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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.
whats the reasoning
Personal negative dealings with the Catholic Church
From a contemporary article:
O'Connor, in a statement Thursday in London, reiterated her objections to the church, which she holds responsible for the child abuse she suffered.
The Vatican uses “marriage, divorce and in particular birth control and abortion to control us through our children and through fear,” she said.
So, even then, it is less specific than us commonly credited todays it was not about covering up child sex abuse.
https://books.google.com/books?id=IalJAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA114#v=onepage&q&f=false
She's been in a Magdalene Laundry in her youth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_asylum