• Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • Stovetop@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    She was right to rip up a picture of the pope.

    But I think she was wrong to convert to Islam if her priorities were denial of religious tyranny.

  • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • VindictiveJudge@startrek.website
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • derf82@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

        • derf82@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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

    • Mostly_Gristle@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      At the time? Practically everybody. She got absolutely slaughtered in the media, and it went on for years.

        • MartinXYZ@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • catch22@startrek.website
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            11 months ago

            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.

              • creamed_eels@toast.ooo
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                11 months ago

                Right, because tearing a picture is worse than the sexual assault of countless children. What a pos

                • MartinXYZ@sh.itjust.works
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                  11 months ago

                  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.

                  Edit: Madonna playing the prude was a nice touch.

  • Got_Bent@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • MartinXYZ@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • Clanket@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • VoilaChihuahua@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    For me, outrage at tearing an image implies the subject is beyond reproach and that concept itself is extremely concerning / problematic.

    • lefaucet@slrpnk.net
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      11 months ago

      Thanks for sharing this. I’d never heard of this program. Good counterbalance to Behind the Bastards

      • YtA4QCam2A9j7EfTgHrH@infosec.pub
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        11 months ago

        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.

    • DessertStorms@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      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).

      • Custoslibera@lemmy.worldOP
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        11 months ago

        Crazy is the wrong word when referring to her mental health issues.

        But she did have some crazy takes. Like not mental health related, just crazy/zany/bat shit.