Irish-born pop star Sinéad O’Connor is dead, at the ripe old age of 56. O’Connor was best known for perhaps two things: her 1990 hit single “Nothing Compares 2 U” and her lifelong activism against Catholicism and all the Catholic Church holds dear and sacred. How ought a faithful Catholic respond to the death of someone who weaponized her fame and set herself up as an enemy of the Church and all the Church holds dear and sacred? As in all things, with hope, charity, and prayer. (RELATED: Faithful Catholic Institutions Defy Trend of Secularization)

Perhaps one of the most notorious examples of her controversial activism was O’Connor’s 1992 appearance as the musical guest on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Though originally slated to sing songs from her new album, the pop star opted instead for an acapella cover of Bob Marley’s ‘War,’ and infamously shredded a photo of Pope St. John Paul II on live television, faulting the pontiff for the as-yet-underreported abuse crisis in the Church. When hosting the following week, Catholic and Academy Award-winning actor Joe Pesci opened the show by pasting the picture back together to great applause. 

Opposition to clerical sex abuse is, of course, laudable, but O’Connor seemingly used the crisis as an opportunity to attack the Church itself, made evident through her destruction of the image of the Pope and manifest through her choices over the course of the rest of her life. O’Connor was, not quite famously but certainly notably, a staunch pro-abortion advocate. Although she reportedly rejected her record label’s pleas to abort her first child, O’Connor did have an abortion three years later, sans studio-pressure. She also spoke at pro-abortion rallies in Ireland, which only legalized the barbaric practice in 2018.

Speaking of her views on abortion in 1991, O’Connor erroneously and even nonsensically said, “I just believe that if a child is meant to be born it will be born. It doesn’t really matter whether you have an abortion or a miscarriage. The whole issue is pro-choice,” clearly disregarding the fact that miscarriage isn’t a choice and embracing the unspoken pro-abortion maxim that it’s only a baby if it’s wanted. (RELATED: Who Ended Roe? Catholics)

Amidst a lifetime promoting feminism and LGBT ideology and after being ordained a “priest” in the schismatic Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, O’Connor’s final apostasy was her conversion to Islam. After changing her name to Magda Davitt in 2017 as a protest against “patriarchal slave names” and “parental curses,” O’Connor took a new name the following year when she converted to Islam and re-christened herself Shuhada’ Sadaqat.

O’Connor clearly spent her life seeking identity: fleeing the Catholic Church, associating it with her broken childhood, and rushing from fame to feminism to abortion to Islam and, finally, to the grave. Catholics know that we are bound to the sacraments of the Church — a doctrine expressed in the words, “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” meaning, “There is no salvation outside the Church” — but Christ Himself is not bound to the sacraments and can, we hope, pray, and trust, operate outside of them to extend His boundless mercy to those willing to accept it.(Read More: Catholic Integralism Will Not Win the Culture War)  

After a half century of railing against the Holy Catholic Church and its doctrines, dogmas, and precepts, O’Connor is now dead, as are all who have ever thought they might see the Church’s demise. Catholics must recognize that the ideologies O’Connor promoted are pathways leading directly into Hell. But we must ardently pray for her soul, and that Christ offered to her in her last moments the mercy she scorned and rejected throughout her life and that, even now, that there may still be a chance this lost, unhappy sinner will be saved. This same charity must be extended to all those who posture as enemies of the Church and enemies of the West. Perhaps the same charity and mercy will be extended to we who know how badly we need it.