Lux Lucet

I myself was never Roman Catholic, and neither was my family. I had always been a bit uneasy with Roman Catholicism but didn’t have any understanding of the Church’s heretical doctrines. That came later.  But with all the media lauding John Paul II, it was easy to get pulled into the notion that he was, in some way, a representative of Christianity. 

And who was this Sinead O’Connor anyway?  Some lefty commie type?  Who does she think she is coming on live national television and tearing up a picture of a Christian, anti-communist hero?

Now you may be asking why I’m bringing up a story about what a singer did on a Saturday Night Live program over 30 years ago. The answer lies in the news reports last week telling of Sinead O’Connor’s death at the age of 56. 

What I didn’t know in 1992 and didn’t find out until reading a New York Times article reporting on her death was that O’Connor’s motivation for denouncing the pope and tearing up his picture was not some leftist political cause but represented her protest against the abuse she had suffered at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church while growing up in Ireland.  According to the New York Times piece “Sinead O’Connor condemned Church Abuse Early. America Didn’t Listen.” O’Connor was sent to An Grianán Training Centre in Dublin at the age of 14.   The article describes An Grianán as a “rehabilitation center” run by the Order of Our Lady of Charity and notes that was a former Magdalene Laundry, “a facility where a ‘fallen woman’ might spend her entire life washing the dirty laundry of the surrounding community.” 

The article notes that O’Connor spent 2 years at this facility and witnessed any number of horrors.  Remember, we’re not talking about something that took place in the 19^th century. We’re talking about the 1980s here. O’Connor recalls speaking to older women at the facility “who were there because they ‘had their babies taken off them, or because they were sexually abused and complained and nobody believed them.”

These “rehabilitation centers” were a sort of informal prison system run by Rome.  According to the Times piece,

In the Ireland of Ms. (sic) O’Connor’s youth, politics were dominated by the Catholic Church. For decades, priests at the parish level saw part of their role as protecting the community from sexual promiscuity, homosexuality and unwed mothers and their children.

To do so, they used an unwritten, extralegal power to send women accused of such sins to reform schools, workhouses and other facilities run by Catholic orders.

According to one person interviewed in the article, “you could vanish” into this system. O’Connor recalls begin sent as punishment to spend the night in An Grianán’s infirmary wing, which O’Connor called “a secret hospice.” 

“There was no staff,” she recalled in a 2021 interview. “These ladies were calling out all night, ‘Nurse! Nurse!,’ and there was nobody to come.”

Ms. (sic) O’Connor described nights there as horrifying and panic-inducing, but also said she had come to feel “terribly, terribly lucky that god put me” in An Grianán “because otherwise those women, we would never have heard of them.”

The system of abuse had been normalized, spoken of only in hushed tones, in Ireland for decades, Ms. (sic) O’Connor said. “But I met them at their dying moment and saw them every day, the way they were treated.”

Some Roman Catholics have called O’Connor’s action on Saturday Night Live “brave and prophetic” in that hers was an early protest against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church a full decade before the scandal first broke in the United States in 2002.

In another article, O’Connor is quoted commenting on the religious oppression she grew up under in Ireland.

I grew up in a very different Ireland to the one that exists now. And it was a very oppressed country, religiously speaking, and everybody was miserable. Nobody was getting any joy in God.

How Sinead O’Connor found peace in Islam after a lifelong struggle with religion, NPR, July 29, 2023

I must admit, as an American and never having been a Roman Catholic, I have a hard time imagining the kind of oppression O’Connor speaks of.  I know it only from the outside.  But I’ve heard enough Roman Catholics speak this way that I have no doubt what she said was true.  How could anyone get any joy out of God under Rome’s system of oppressive priestcraft where there is no gospel and no hope? 

I wish there were a happy ending to this story, but such appears not to be the case.  O’Connor announced in 2018 that she was “reverting to Islam” and changed her name to Shuhada Sadaqat. As far as  I can tell, there is no evidence that O’Connor ever turned in faith to Jesus Christ, the only one who could have forgiven her sins and healed her of the damage that was inflicted on her by Rome.

May the Lord have mercy on the many who have suffered abuse at the hands of Rome and bring them to saving faith in Christ, who alone is the righteousness of his people.

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