Before I resigned myself to a place in Hell, I was a devout Catholic. Throughout my childhood I prayed to God, I felt good whenever I attended Mass, and I used to close my eyes to receive Communion, believing I felt something. The second most impactful role model in my life, apart from Dad, really was Jesus; he whose gentleness I idolized, whose followers he had garnered out of respect for his benevolence, and his insistence on blessing even those who scorned him. I solemnly revered his tragic end the way the Bible described it: dying at the hands of people who condemned him for his righteousness, crucified for standing up for the good in the world.
I was baptized in late 1992, right around the time Sinéad O’Connor took a picture of Pope John Paul II, hidden behind her back in case someone tried to stop her, and ripped it into pieces on live television. Years later, as the seismic event continued to overshadow her career, I received First Communion. I can remember my excitement at confronting the mystery, feeling that comforting sense of belonging from being inducted into an organized belief system. Monsignor Frederick J. Ryan - “Father Ryan,” as he was known among the Catholic community of my hometown, was there to oversee the ceremony.
From my perspective, everyone loved Father Ryan. At the time, he was in a formidable position of power among the clergy, having been the Vice Chancellor of the Archdiocese of Boston. Though he oversaw sixteen churches across the South Shore, he happened to hold court in my particular local church. He also conducted the Masses I dutifully attended with my mother, who hadn’t yet been absolved from her divorce from the man that had cheated on her and thus was forbidden from partaking in the sacrament. I never thought much of that at the time. I was just a kid absorbed in the practice, always ecstatic to receive the holy spirit in the presence of the man with the round glasses and the strange, soft smile.
When I was 10, we stopped going to church for a brief period, and I didn’t question it, mainly because it allowed me more time on my Game Boy. When we returned, there was someone else standing at the altar, a kindly yet sickly soul who would later oversee my position as an altar boy when I hit my teens. I never saw Father Ryan again.
The role of the church, believed by many parents both secular and religious, is integral to the upbringing of a child. In a world with blurry edges and steep precipices, the church is the place best suited for teaching easily-comprehendable models of right and wrong, or of good and of evil. The church also has the ability to temper the wildest behaviors by instilling the cold, chilling fear of God - transgress and suffer the worst fate you can possibly imagine, forever. (It’s a comparable stick to the carrot of Santa, who promises presents to the well-behaved and slyly spins the great gears of capitalism.) And at the time, the fear of God had ingrained itself harder than ever into America amid the post-Reagan days. The Christian nationalism blossoming today sowed its seeds in Reagan-era conservatism, with the administration’s vehement support for families and the protection of children as the crux of the movement’s moral crusade. By 1992, when George Bush Sr. was fighting for reelection and the AIDS crisis raged onward, Christianity and its cohorts had reached peak influence in America, at least in the crepuscular moments when an American monoculture still existed.
It wasn’t hard to ruffle feathers, and some found it to be a powerful marketing tactic. Kurt Cobain screamed “God is gay,” on an album that overtook Michael Jackson as the top-selling record in America right around the start of the year. Madonna, meanwhile, had taken a gamble on her first enormous entrepreneurial move - the simultaneous release of her fifth LP Erotica with the coffee-table book Sex - hoping to push the envelope through provocative art on the world stage.
She lost that bet. Sinéad’s photocide, capped by her mandate to “fight the real enemy” as she thrust the pieces of Paul toward the millions watching, overwhelmed the release of Sex and Erotica, and all their industry-approved provocation, in the press. It had been five years since she became a cult figure in the country on the strength of her debut LP, The Lion and the Cobra, and two years since her incendiary cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” sent her sophomore LP, I Don’t Want What I Haven’t Got, to the top of the Billboard 200. It also wasn’t the first time she had courted some semblance of righteous controversy. The previous year, she had initially declined to perform on the show in a denouncement of her planned episode’s host, Andrew Dice Clay. She also refused to play at festivals or concerts that played “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
This was different. Her a capella performance of Bob Marley’s “War,” the lyrics subtly transubstantiated into a condemnation of the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child abuse, would transcend mere controversy. It would define her life right up until her death.
If you believe that all publicity is good publicity, then Sinéad’s stunt at 30 Rock caused a hell of a lot of good publicity. NBC fielded over 4,000 calls from disgruntled viewers by the end of the night. Frank Sinatra said he wanted to punch her in the face. Joe Pesci, the following week, held up a taped-together picture of the Pope and offered a similarly violent sentiment against her. Later in the season, when it was Madonna’s turn to scandalize, she spoofed Sinéad’s transgression by ripping a picture of Joey Buttafuoco, a convicted statutory rapist and pulpy tabloid figure. “Fight the real enemy,” she offered in regards to the man whose name had become a running gag on The David Letterman Show; later, Sinéad would claim that Madonna appraised her signature shaved visage as “being run over by a lawnmower.”
The vehement response to O’Connor illustrated a notion - inconvenient to some, incontrovertible to many, many others - that attacking the Catholic Church meant attacking America. “In God We Trust” cries our money. I assume none of them were aware of Sinéad’s own childhood abuse at the hands of her mother, which Sinéad herself empathetically dismissed in interviews as a product of her mother’s unhappiness with her marriage. (Until 1995, divorce was illegal in Ireland, due to Catholic doctrine.)
And so America, the way America loves to do, fought back. After two weeks of uproar, when Sinéad O’Connor took the stage at Madison Square Garden to sing Bob Dylan’s “I Believe In You,” she met a wall of malcontents. The performance, which you can still view on YouTube, is a series of moments. The sheer decibel level of the festival goers who, attending a tribute to a man whose art had challenged the foundation of the country shouted and booed, facilely chastising her for her blasphemy. The initial gratitude, and then silent shock, on Sinead’s ivory-white face. The feeble attempts to kickstart the cover, which O’Connor shuts down to stare straight ahead in resistance, the corners of her mouth tilting upward, taking in the jeers, the crucifiers, they who know not what they do. The moment she rips off her earpieces and starts in on her “War” cover, the veins in her neck popping as her amplified voice reflects the righteousness right back, even as it struggles to overcome the din. Her final gaze out to the crowd before she sidesteps the mic stand, her last line of defense, to stoically demonstrate the line she draws in the sand. When she leaves the stage she collapses in sobs, something inside her breaking down for good.
Her career, from then on, was a Newton’s Cradle of double-downs and retractions, justifications and rug-sweepings, outbursts and quiet moments of desperation, ordinations, conversions, haphazard tweets, demise, and despair. It saw her finally excommunicated from the Catholic Church and converting to Islam in 2018. It saw her lose custody of her own child, and it saw the last year of her life living with his suicide: forced again to treat another fresh wound, arms fatigued from bailing out the boat.
What it didn’t involve was a whole lot of music, which is its own level of tragedy, because nobody had a voice quite like her. A lot of them tried, lord knows. A lot of them also owe it to her too. Fiona Apple, Alanis Morrisette, Courtney Love, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos: so many women unafraid to be something different than what the world demanded they be.
It’s not easy, not at all what you or I can conceive of. Being someone like Sinéad O’Connor takes a certain courage. Not the dragon-slaying courage, the kind you read about in storybooks. It’s a courage that requires constant maintenance, fuel burning in the greedy furnace. It eats away at your willpower and causes you to question your steadfastness and makes it so you don’t look so courageous on the outside anymore.
We rush to grieve for her today, but we should have grieved for her more when she was alive, when she was fighting a war no one wanted to fight, at a time when seemingly everyone demanded she not fight it. America was unkind to O’Connor the way it is unkind to all the people who challenge it. It was unkind the same way it is casually unkind to women, to cultures unfamiliar to its ken, to people with deep-rooted mental health issues, all those destined to be misunderstood. They should’ve believed in her, because she was right. She was right all along.
I soon figured out why we paused our weekly church trips. Someone broke the news to me in less-than-euphemistic terms. That March, a man named Garry Garland filed a lawsuit against the archdiocese accusing Ryan of sexually assaulting him as a 14-year-old. Unbeknownst to most of the people filling out the pews around me at Mass, Ryan had spent over a decade at Catholic Memorial High School being, in his words, “a counselor to individual boys in specific needs.” Garland was an athlete at the school, participating in football, basketball, and hockey, and he was good enough to receive a full scholarship to the University of Maine.
According to the lawsuit, Ryan had encouraged him to drink, taken him back to his living quarters at the chancery in Brighton (a room, Garland claimed, that was covered in hundreds of photographs of student-athletes), and orally raped him. Later, after Ryan had taken photos of the assault, he leveraged them as blackmail against Garland to keep him silent for years. At one point, Garland was forced to use Ryan as an officiate for his 1992 wedding; minutes before the ceremony, in the sacristy, Ryan groped and attempted to kiss him.
Two more voices came out in the wake of the scandal, and after the archdiocese was successfully sued, Ryan was defrocked and left the church. The allegations remained allegations, but supporting evidence continued to trickle out. In 2013, a photo revealed Ryan at dinner with infamous Boston gangster Whitey Bulger (the inspiration for Frank Costello’s character in Martin Scorsese's The Departed). In 2017, former Boston Bruins defender Chris Nilan testified under oath that Ryan had personally confessed to him his assaults on the three boys. One of the victims, David Carney, had been coerced into being intoxicated and was taken to a parlor to be tattooed with the image of a baby devil in a diaper. The other, a heroin addict left anonymous for privacy, had continued a relationship with Ryan until 2014. Carney later stated in a news conference that he was shocked Ryan gave himself up, adding, “I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him.”
As of 2022, Ryan lives somewhere in Iowa. Garland still lives in the state, having fashioned himself a successful career in sales despite struggling with alcohol and drug problems. I left the church in 2010 after serving as an altar boy for four years, still wondering where to put my faith, unaware of how narrowly the arrow missed my head. Sinead O’Connor died today at 56 years old after decades of coping with strife and trauma, her troubles magnified by the grand misunderstanding of infamy.
There is a voice in the blue sky that booms with laughter. There is a fire that burns eternally here on Earth.