Just a reminder that she didn’t actually explain why she was tearing up a picture of the Pope, she just pulled out a picture of him and tore it up without context. Nobody understood wtf was happening.
Yeah, there is a lot of revisionist history about this. This was well before the sex abuse story came out. The idea that that’s what she was protesting was lost on everyone.
John Paul II had an attempted assassination a decade before this (where he literally met with his attempted assassin to offer forgiveness), and was also leading efforts to apologize for past church participation in things like the holocaust, the slave trade, oppressing women, and even executing Galileo.
This is not to defend him. He absolutely ignored sex abuse and deserves hate, but when O’Connor did that, he was immensely popular. Tearing up his picture while singing Bob Marley’s War (a song about racism and inequality) was just a protest of which the purpose of which no viewer could figure out. She merely said “fight the real enemy” and didn’t reveal any additional reasoning until she sat for an interview a month later.
Late to this party, but I was in college and saw it happen when it aired. My reaction to it was, “Whoa!” though it didn’t really hit me as anything more since I wasn’t Catholic.
I did not see the aftermath coming. It was like she just instantly disappeared.
Thirty years later, she seems like the trailblazer for getting one’s life ruined from retribution for daring to call out shitty behavior of powerful people and entities.
Around this time Nirvana drew a lot of attention for mocking Top of the Pops by miming hilariously badly to Smells like teen spirit on air. It was a more innocent time. Ripping up a pic of the pope was wild.
It’s taken her dying for a lot of people to realise the absolute gem of a person she really was. RIP Sinead. We’ve lost 3 Irish musical gems this year.
It’s the same with Jimmy Saville, everybody knew. I remember chatting on a forum in a thread about celebrities who are absolute assholes. I’m not from the UK, so I didn’t know him before somebody in that thread told us about this lady from his little town who was given a small book store by Saville, alledgedly because he had abused her when she was a girl, and threatened to go public. Granted, Sinnead O’Connor took it to another level. And Joe Pesci showed his true colors. What an asshole.
Totally. I always think of this when people say Muslims overreact about drawings of their prophet or people burning their holy book. There were protests in the streets and famous Catholics like Pesci and Madonna attacked O’Connor in the press. Madonna, it seemed, was even more frustrated because this thing completely removed the attention from her new album that came out around the same time.
The whole Jimmy saville thing was insane, he had the keys to mental hospitals. The BBC chauffeured him about, very much like they picked up schoolgirls from school for Russell brand to be brought back to his flat.
Saville was great friends with the royals and thatchers government, you’d think the secret services would have known what he was up to… Thatchers home secretary Leon Britton was accused around the same time a lot of others were found out, but Theresa May’s government shut that down.
Reading this back, I’m thinking I can’t post this it’s sounds nuts. Maybe that’s how these fuckers get away with it…
Hadn’t heard about Pesci, probably playing on his Italian gangster fame, what a twat.
very much like they picked up schoolgirls from school for Russell brand to be brought back to his flat.
Is this what happened with Russell Brand? I just heard he was a sexual predator, not that it was schoolgirls. It’s insane that the BBC didn’t get any wiser after Saville. It should be easy: don’t hire known pervs and definitely don’t let them use your stuff to abuse children.
The age of consent is 16 in the UK, Saville was also a necrophiliac, and that access to hospitals was used for that, so maybe the BBC seen this as pretty tame…
Ripping up an image never makes anyone a bad person, religious figure or not.
Sure, I may prefer the tearing sound that images of Mohammed being ripped apart make… But that’s just subjective personal preference. Doesn’t mean people tearing up an image of the Virgin Mary are bad people. The important thing is neither does anything real to cause harm to anyone at all.
Remember kids, the church still continues to shuffle pedo priests and is still telling victims to eat shit. The Catholic Church is a corporation, and they only care about money and power, no matter how much their current PR pope spews hollow platitudes, without actually fixing anything.
Empty words from a fake “holy” leader who was elected by a board room of bankers and financiers.
Sophie the producer was so tired of hearing about terrible people that she got Magpie to make this show. It is really good. But it is still pretty depressing because the majority of cool people die horribly.
Long before the '70s. The British arms manufacturing companies Vickers and Armstrong Whitworth merged in the late 1920s to become Vickers-Armstrongs Limited. Employees of the former Armstrong Whitworth were not happy about the merger and joked about being like choirboys - because they were being buggered by Vickers (i.e. “buggered by vicars”).
Jeff Dunham even did a joke with Achmed the dead terrorist.
“I like to throw a penny between two Jews and watch them fight to the death. I also do the same with Catholic priests but instead I throw a small boy! The winner has to fight Michael Jackson!”
Well you’ll be pleased to know that more and more young Latinos actually like LatinX every year. Especially when it comes to college populations where Latino people are an ever growing population.
However, a majority of those surveyed in a Gallup poll – 57% – said it didn’t matter how they labeled.
A new priest has to replace another priest who recently retired. As he’s taking confession, the woman on the other side says she sinned because she performed a blowjob. The priest had no idea of the correct penance for this. Just then a young acolyte passes so he leans out of his chair and asks the boy: “how much do they give around here for a blowjob?” The boy promptly answers: “One snicker bar, sir.”
Yeah, that’s the kinda stuff going around in the 80s.
Somewhere in Rousseau’s “Confessions” there’s a bunch about him becoming disillusioned by the church as a child because of sexual abuse, and the head priest tells him “that’s how it’s always been”. That was written in 1769!
So.. You're still judging her harshly, despite finding out you were wrong (and decades behind everyone else, which takes some intentional avoidance of the topic, and clearly without taking in to consideration the impact people, well, like you, had on her mental health).
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