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.
They’re much more powerful than a corporation, though. Can you imagine any ordinary corporation surviving a child molestation scandal like that?
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.
Just realizing this now? The church scandals broke wide open 20 years ago.
We were telling dirty jokes about priests and alter boys when I was a kid in the 80s. It was well known and rampant 20 years BEFORE 20 years ago.
Jeff Dunham even did a joke with Achmed the dead terrorist.
“I like to throw a penny between two Jews and watch them fight to the death. I also do the same with Catholic priests but instead I throw a small boy! The winner has to fight Michael Jackson!”
Hate that Jeff Dunham idiot. Being straight up racist with a puppet is not comedy, no matter how much your racist uncle laughs at his “jokes”
Yeah as a kid in the 70s, it was a known trope. Benny Hill and Monty Python even alluded to it.
Long before the '70s. The British arms manufacturing companies Vickers and Armstrong Whitworth merged in the late 1920s to become Vickers-Armstrongs Limited. Employees of the former Armstrong Whitworth were not happy about the merger and joked about being like choirboys - because they were being buggered by Vickers (i.e. “buggered by vicars”).
A new priest has to replace another priest who recently retired. As he’s taking confession, the woman on the other side says she sinned because she performed a blowjob. The priest had no idea of the correct penance for this. Just then a young acolyte passes so he leans out of his chair and asks the boy: “how much do they give around here for a blowjob?” The boy promptly answers: “One snicker bar, sir.”
Yeah, that’s the kinda stuff going around in the 80s.
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.
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.
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
