Lentorama 2009: Great(?) Moments in Catholics on Television

October 3, 1992: Sinead O'Connor implores us to fight the real enemy

In warm-ups for her appearance on Saturday Night Live, O'Connor performed an a capella version of Bob Marley's "War," holding up the picture of an African child at the end to dramatize the song's stand against racism. But when she performed the song live, she replaced the word "racism" with the phrase "child abuse," held up a picture of Pope John Paul II when singing the word "evil," and then tore up the picture while saying "fight the real enemy."

The changes, inspired by then-current sex abuse scandals in the church (I assume this one, primarily), resulted in a surge of sentiment against O'Connor. NBC, who claimed to not know about her changes, was inundated with angry phone calls, and to this day rebroadcasts of the episode include her warm-up performance (though the picture-tearing version is shown on a DVD compilation of SNL music performances). O'Connor would also encounter hostile crowds at shows, while her act would be fodder for later SNL parody, including Madonna's tearing up a picture of Joey Buttafuco and Jan Hooks playing an apologetic O'Connor.

For all that O'Connor was ahead of the curve as far as sex abuse in the church goes, the incident more or less capped her popular music career, and marked the start of significant personal changes. In the late 1990s she was given priestly ordination by a schismatic Catholic group, and not long after that she outed herself as a lesbian. She would later waver on both accounts, as she developed an interest in Rastafarianism after spending time in Jamaica in 2004, and she would describe herself as only one-quarter gay in a 2005 Entertainment Weekly interview.