On 3 October 1992, the Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor appeared on the American television programme Saturday Night Live (SNL and staged a protest against the Catholic Church. While performing a rendition of Bob Marley's 1976 song "War", she held a photograph of Pope John Paul II up to the camera, tore it to pieces, said "fight the real enemy", and threw the pieces to the floor.
In an interview the following month, O'Connor said she held the Catholic Church responsible for physical, sexual and emotional abuse she had suffered as a child. She said the Church had destroyed "entire races of people", and that Catholic priests had been abusing children for years. Her protest took place nine years before John Paul II publicly acknowledged child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
The protest triggered hundreds of complaints from viewers, criticism from institutions ranging from the Catholic Church to the Anti-Defamation League and mockery from celebrities like Joe Pesci and Madonna, who both lampooned the performance on SNL later that season. Two weeks after her SNL appearance, O'Connor was booed at the 30th-anniversary tribute concert for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Nevertheless, O'Connor said she did not regret her act, as she felt miscast in the role of a pop star, when she saw herself as a protest singer. After the Catholic Church's cover-up of abuse became public, retrospective opinion towards O'Connor, especially since her death in 2023, shifted in support of her. For example, in 2020 Time named O'Connor the most influential woman of 1992 for her protest.
Background
Daniel Glass, an executive at her record label, said that by 1992 Sinead O'Connor "was not getting a lot of love [...] she was controversial, she hadn’t had a hit in a while". In 1990, for example, O'Connor had withdrawn from a scheduled appearance on the American television show Saturday Night Live when she learnt it was to be hosted by Andrew Dice Clay, who she said was disrespectful to women. She had been criticised as anti-American for refusing to have "The Star-Spangled Banner" played prior to a New Jersey show. Later that year, when she won three MTV Video Music awards, she made a speech "connect[ing] her experience [of radio censorship] with the industry’s censorship of Black artists". She boycotted the 33rd Annual Grammy Awards and refused the Grammy Award she won a few months later, after writing a letter to the Recording Academy criticising the music industry as materialistic. O'Connor, who was raised Catholic, also criticised the Catholic Church for its positions on birth control and divorce, and stormed the office of the Irish Prime Minister in a 1992 protest related to a 14-year old rape victim seeking an abortion.
Performance
On 3 October 1992, O'Connor appeared on SNL to promote her new album, Am I Not Your Girl?. She performed two songs, the first of which was her new single "Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home", leading two influential alternative rock radio figures in the studio to tell Glass, her record company executive, that they would be adding it to their playlists. For the second song, O'Connor had chosen to perform an a cappella version of Bob Marley's 1976 song "War", wearing a necklace with the Rastafari star and a scarf with the Rastafari and Ethiopian colours. The original lyrics to "War" are the text of a speech given by Haile Selassie in 1968, but in her version, O'Connor replaced Selassie's references to the then-current political situation in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa with lyrics related to child abuse. Throughout the performance, she stared intently into the camera, and as she sang the final line, "we have confidence in the victory of good over evil", O'Connor held a photograph of Pope John Paul II up directly in front of the camera, and ripped it up, saying "fight the real enemy", before throwing the pieces to the floor.
O'Connor said that the photograph, taken during John Paul II's 1979 visit to Ireland, had hung in her mother's bedroom until her death when O'Connor was 18. Since then, she had been waiting for the right moment to destroy it and got the idea of ripping it up on-camera from the Boomtown Rats, whose lead singer, Bob Geldof, had shredded a photo of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on the British television programme Top of the Pops.