Posthumous Award
Advocate

On October 3, 1992, the Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor appeared as a musical guest on the American television programme Saturday Night Live (SNL) and staged a protest against the Catholic Church. While performing a rendition of Bob Marley's 1976 song "War", she held a photograph of Pope John Paul II up to the camera, tore it to pieces, said "fight the real enemy", and threw the pieces to the floor.

In an interview a few weeks after the performance, O'Connor said she held the Catholic Church responsible for physical, sexual and emotional abuse she had suffered as a child. She also said that the Church had destroyed "entire races of people", and that Catholic priests had been beating and sexually abusing children for years. O'Connor's performance took place nine years before John Paul II publicly acknowledged child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.