On 3 October 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.

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.

[1] O'Connor's performance took place nine years before John Paul II publicly acknowledged child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Two weeks after her SNL appearance, O'Connor was booed at the 30th-anniversary tribute concert for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

[4] In 1990, O'Connor had withdrawn from a scheduled appearance on the American television show Saturday Night Live (SNL) when she learnt it was to be hosted by Andrew Dice Clay, who she said was disrespectful to women.

[10] She said she took the idea of ripping it up on-camera from the Boomtown Rats, whose lead singer, Bob Geldof, had shredded a photo of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John on the British television programme Top of the Pops.

[13] Glass said that everyone at SNL "froze" after the live performance, unsure how to react, and that the music producer Liz Welch "went from jubilation to tears".

The Catholic cardinal Bernard Francis Law (who in 2002 resigned as Archbishop of Boston for covering up abuse) called the act a "gesture of hate" and "neo-anti-Catholicism".

After performing her single "Bad Girl", she held up a picture of the sex offender Joey Buttafuoco, said "fight the real enemy",[24] and tore it up.

[25] In an interview with Bob Guccione Jr. a year earlier, O'Connor had mentioned that despite Madonna being admired as a campaigner for women's rights, she had "slagged [me] off", saying "I look like I had a run-in with a lawn mower and that I was about as sexy as a venetian blind".

[26] In a 1993 editorial, Guccione called Madonna's newly refound faith "convenient" and ascribed her criticism of O'Connor to opportunism, as she sought to stay in the news while promoting her album Erotica and her book Sex, both of which he panned.

[25] Two weeks after her appearance on Saturday Night Live, O'Connor performed at the 30th-anniversary tribute concert for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

[30] In the first episode aired after O'Connor's death, an SNL Weekend Update segment briefly referenced the incident as an example of a great musical performance.

[33] NBC did not rebroadcast the live performance unedited until 2025, when it was featured in the documentary film Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music.

[34] Reruns of the episode replaced the performance with the dress rehearsal, and previous documentaries such as "Saturday Night Live Backstage" would edit out her ripping the photo apart, though an exemption was granted in 2010 when Sinead O'Connor appeared on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show.