Today in 1992, Sinéad O’Connor performed an a capella version of Bob Marley’s War on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. As she reached the final line, singing, “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil,” she held up a photograph of Pope John Paul II and tore it into pieces, looked into the camera and said "Fight the real enemy". There was no applause, or laugh track, only silence. NBC, panicked and cut to commercial. By the next morning the phones were ringing off the hook with thousands of complaints from viewers outraged at the desecration of a sacred image. O’Connor, raised a Catholic in Dublin, had committed one of the last true acts of iconoclasm on American television. In an interview with Time magazine shortly after, she explained “In Ireland we see our people are manifesting the highest incidence in Europe of child abuse. This is a direct result of the fact that they’re not in contact with their history as Irish people and the fact that in the schools, the priests have been beating the shit out of the children for years and sexually abusing them. This is the example that’s been set for the people of Ireland.” It was 1992, years before the floodgates of clerical abuse scandals opened in Ireland and across the Catholic world. She acknowledged the rot before the world would face it. The cost to her career was immediate. Less than two weeks later, at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in Madison Square Garden, she was introduced by Kris Kristofferson, who described her name as “synonymous with courage and integrity.” Yet as she walked onto the stage, the boos began. O’Connor stood, expressionless and humiliated. Kristofferson wrapped his arm around her and whispered into her ear, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” She sang War again, her voice unbroken, and walked off the stage a pariah. With the hindsight of decades, the scene looks different. The Pope she tore up presided over an institution that would, in time, face worldwide exposure for concealing crimes of abuse. The silence of the SNL studio that night was the silence of a world not yet ready to hear her.