PRIESTHOOD
The photo-tearing incident occurred in 1992. 'Prayer for England' was issued in 2003. In between the two, in 1994, there was the album Universal Mother, which largely concerns her own experience of motherhood, but it also evokes God as a mother; and in 1999, she was ordained as a priest by Bishop Michael Cox of the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church - a church derived from Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, elder brother of Ngo Dinh Diem, assassinated President of South Vietnam. Archbishop Thuc had separated from the papacy in protest against Vatican II. Cox, the previous year, had ordained Father Pat Buckley as a Bishop. In his book A Sexual life - a spiritual life, Buckley says that, though he himself agrees with the ordination of women, he was unhappy about O'Connor's ordination first because of a suggestion that money had been involved and then, while expressing great respect for her personally, he didn't feel that she had been sufficiently prepared for the role. As a result he separated from Cox and instead received a 'conditional consecration' at the hands of Bishop Peter Paul Brennan of the US Ecumenical Catholic Church. A whole world of independent Catholic churches of which I was quite unaware is opening out before my eyes!
It's one of the disappointments of Rememberings that she says nothing about her ordination though it does include a photograph of her in her priest's outfit. She does say, however:
'I’m certain part of the reason I became a singer was that I couldn’t become a priest, given that I had a vagina and a pair of breasts (however insignificant). I always had an interest in working with dying people, because I was always a person who believed very much in an afterlife and in the lack of need to fear death, which I discerned from having had the Gospels drilled into me. I figured that was Jesus’s reason for coming to Earth. That seemed to sink in to such a degree that only now, as I’m writing about my songs, have I become aware that an awful lot of them are about death or talking to dying people or where the narrator is a dead person.'
And again: 'I should have been a missionary, in fact, but the next best thing was music.'
The year after she was ordained as a priest she produced an album with the promising title Faith and courage. It contains sentiments, though, that are surprising - maybe absolutely without precedent - coming from a newly ordained priest, for example in a song addressed to her father, Daddy I'm fine, expressing her feelings when she first arrived in England:
Sorry to be disappointing
Wasn't born for no marrying
Wanna make my own living singing
Strong independent Pagan woman singing
And I feel real cool and I feel real good
Got my hair shaved off and my black thigh boots
I stand up tall with my pride upright
And I feel real hot when the makeup's nice
I get sexy underneath them lights
Like I wanna fuck every man in sight
She also addresses God as a goddess, for example in another song addressed to her mother, 'What doesn't belong to me':
I'm Irish, I'm English, I'm Moslem, I'm Jewish,
I'm a girl, I'm a boy
And the goddess meant me for only joy.'
Youtube features a video of her singing 'What doesn't belong to me' from 2012, dressed in her priest's outfit. Although it's one of the ugliest pieces of clothing ever devised she, of course, looks very good in it. By this time she's over forty years old but with her shaven head she looks like a ten-year old boy. That she did, or does, in fact see herself seriously as a priest, or a missionary, or a preacher, comes over clearly in the song 'The Lamb's book of life':
Out of history we have come
With great hatred and little room
It aims to break our hearts
Wreck us up and tear us all apart
But if we listen to the preacher man
He can show us how it can be done
To live in peace and live as one
Get our names back in the book of life of the lamb
Out of hopelessness we can come
If people just believe it can be done
'Cause every prayer ever prayed is heard
Take power in the power of the word
Out of history we have come
With great hatred and little room
It aims to break our hearts
Wreck us up and tear us all apart ...
But if we listen to the Rasta woman
She can show us how it can be done
To live in peace and live as one
Get our names back in the book of life of the lamb
It is a constant theme with her that God, however understood, is a reality and that a lot of the problems in the world come from the fact that people don't feel that reality, and that a major reason for this is the way God is presented, not as a reality but as an idea, or as a bundle of clichéd sentiments, in religion. But she does see the need for preaching. And she does see the need for Scripture.