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It has been 15 years since Sinéad O'Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live and said, "Fight the real enemy." So it's little wonder she's tired of talking about it and other provocative things she has done over the years.

In fact, she was so tired of it back in 2003 that she quit the music business.

"I was quite disillusioned, and also, I was tired of carrying the weight of the whole 'controversial Sinéad O'Connor' crap," she recently told the London Times. "That's a painful, difficult thing to carry, and I felt I couldn't work without having to deal with that."

Her retirement was short-lived, and now she's out promoting her new album. Which means she's patiently answering more questions about that Saturday Night Live appearance.

But this time, the questions make more sense. Her new album, Theology, is all about God, and almost all of it is based on Scripture.

O'Connor once called tearing the pope's photo "a ridiculous act, the gesture of a girl rebel," but in recent interviews she's anything but apologetic about it.

"Sometimes we want to challenge the people we love, and sometimes we want to rattle the bars because we see them going down the drain unless they face particular issues. And they may not want to face those issues; for example, the issue of sexual abuse by priests within the Catholic church," she told Beliefnet. "Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't actually an angry act, although I can see, of course, why people would think it was. It was actually an act of love."

In that same interview, she lamented Catholicism's decline in her native Ireland as "the baby getting thrown out with the bath water."

Is this the revisionism of a 40-year-old woman who has mellowed in the past decade and a half? Damage control for sales of Theology? Probably not.

Two weeks after the show aired, O'Connor went on stage at New York's Madison Square Garden for the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration. She was booed off the stage. Too bad: The Dylan song she was going to sing was "I Believe in You," his psalm about trusting God amid hardship. (She also recorded it for A Very Special Christmas 2.)

It's tempting to see those actions and conclude that O'Connor is one of those "spiritual but not religious" types. But she doesn't go for that.

"I love religion," she told the Orange County Register. "But I think religion has weaknesses—the chief one being that it doesn't understand that it is not God a lot of the time. … There was a God before religion." (She similarly told Beliefnet, "I adore religion and love it.")

In her music, it's clear that she loves religion. Exactly what religion has not been terribly clear. Take, for example, her 2000 album, Faith and Courage. On "No Man's Woman," she sings:

I got a lovin' man but he's a Spirit.
He never does me harm never treats me bad.
He never takes away all the love he has.
And I'm forgiven—oh!—a million times.

Then, in the clearly autobiographical "Daddy I'm Fine," she identifies herself as a "strong independent pagan woman." On "Emma's Song," she sings, "The great goddess had us blessed." The final track, "Kyrie," is a lovely setting of the liturgical Kyrie eleison in Greek and English ("Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy") overlaid with Rastafarian phrases.

Christian and Rastafarian themes meet again in "The Lamb's Book of Life," a forerunner of many of the themes in Theology:

I bring these blessings with me
A strong heart full of hope and a feeling
That everything in this world would be okay
If people just believed enough in God to pray
But the world thinks that sounds crazy
And that's the thing that makes me sing so sadly
To think that we would leave God so lonely
To think that we would mess up our own destiny.

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July (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51

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