THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) May 13, 1999, Thursday 'I wanted to feel born again' Sinead O'Connor, who once insulted the Pope on television, claims to have been 'ordained'. She talks to Mick Brown. by Mick Brown SINEAD O'CONNOR - or Sinead, Mother Bernadette Maria O'Connor MA, as she now wishes to be known - swears an awful lot. Hardly a sentence passes without an expletive; the result, she says, of being born in Dublin. All the Dublin girls swear, or at least they do in the part of Dublin she comes from. The first thing she plans to do as a priest is to stop swearing. It's not seemly. O'Connor realises she is "a very naughty Irish girl". That's the description of herself she has appended to her open letter to the Pope, asking him to recognise her "ordination" as a Catholic priest. This is the same Pope whom, seven years ago on an American television chat show, she described as "the real enemy", while tearing up his picture. But the Pope, she is sure, will forgive her for that - if he knew anything about it "He forgave the person who shot him, so there's no reason why he shouldn't forgive me. He would have looked at that and thought, that poor girl must be very upset." A lot of people have looked at O'Connor over the past few years and thought the same thing. And the events of the past few weeks will have done nothing to change their minds. Three weeks ago, O'Connor was "ordained" as a priest in a ceremony at the Hotel de la Grotte in Lourdes, conducted by the rebel Irish bishop Michael Cox. Cox styles himself as the Bishop Superior of the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, a member of the Latin Tridentine movement, which continues to perform rituals proscribed by the Second Vatican Council. One approaches O'Connor with trepidation. She is a woman who, to outward appearances, has had her finger on the self-destruct button almost since the first moment she appeared in the public eye nine years ago, with the million-selling song Nothing Compares To U. In the same year, she refused to allow the Stars and Stripes to be unfurled at a concert in America, in protest against censorship in the arts, prompting Frank Sinatra to suggest she should have her "ass kicked". Two years after that, she denounced the Pope on American television; a few months later, she was arrested for trying to enter the Irish parliament to protest against the Supreme Court's decision to refuse an abortion to a 14-year-old. Alongside those protests, there has been the continuing media drama of her private life: the sorry tales of her childhood, reports of suicide attempts, breakdowns, a custody wrangle over one of her two children. But all that, she suggests, is in the past. She sits on a sofa in her large, comfortable north London home, fingering the dog collar at her neck, the cross resting on her breast, and says she has found her vocation, "my truth". O'Connor is sane enough to know that some people think she is mad. She is used, she says, to people thinking her mad simply for believing in God in the first place - "and if that isn't a terrible indictment of all religions, I don't know what is. But I don't mind that. If people hadn't been prepared to appear crazy in the past, there wouldn't be a Church anyway." O'Connor's qualifications for her version of the priesthood may not be immediately apparent. But looking back, she insists she has been preparing all her life for "service". She might have become a nun, "but I didn't want to live without sex. I wanted to be able to have children and get married". The priesthood was not an option, "because I'm a woman. So I became a singer - but these days the singers are the priests." Her theological preparation for her new role includes having "trained" as a medium since she was 18 (she is now 32), latterly at the London College of Psychic Studies, a knowledge of the scriptures derived from her Irish upbringing and a more recent interest in Rastafarianism. But her main qualification, she believes, is her suffering. God, she suggests, has been training her for the job since the day of her birth. Trouble has been the subtext of O'Connor's public life. As a child, she claims, she was subject to abuse from her mother, "from the moment I was conceived". The years as a pop star, the eccentric public pronouncements, the disastrous relationships, the ridicule of the press, the therapy - it has all been leading to this moment. "Something was calling me all my life and making me do the things I was doing. Something in me was saying, 'You have to do this, you have to do that', and I didn't know why. But I can now look back on it and see that my soul was being bounced left, right and centre so I could learn compassion." Matters reached a head after a long-running battle over the custody of her three-year-old daughter, Roisin, with the child's father, John Waters, a journalist on the Irish Times. In February, she was cleared by Camden council of charges by Waters that she was neglecting the child. But last month, she voluntarily handed Roisin over to him after a hearing in Ireland, "defeated", she says, by the whole custodial process. "I was offered the biggest insult you can offer any woman, that I'm not fit to be a mother, and they're going to take my baby away. But if you react at all, you become a bad witness for yourself. I knew I would be a bad witness for myself. If somebody tells me they're going to take my baby, I'm going to leap across the desk and break their face, priest or not. So I gave her back voluntarily." The matter has not yet been resolved. PLUNGED into depression, it is likely, she says, that if she had not been through her unorthodox "ordination", she would have killed herself. "I had the date for ordination set for June, but I begged the bishop to do it earlier. I said to God that I wanted to feel I had died and been born again. And I do feel like that. "I've taken all the negativity that's happened in my life and turned it right round and put it to good use, which is what women do. If I hadn't become a priest, I'd be dead. And I don't care if people say that's the wrong reason. If you can't go to the Church for redemption, where can you go?" O'Connor seems determined to confront the Catholic Church on almost every particular of doctrine. Celibacy for priests, she says, should be "voluntary". Contraception and abortion should both be a matter "of personal choice". She has twice had abortions, "but I would not have an abortion again. I don't believe abortions are right for me. My experience of abortion was that I regret getting pregnant in the first place. "Women get treated so badly in this world, and we've so little self-esteem, that the only thing we can do that makes us feel worthwhile is make babies. It's the only time in your life you're going to feel like a goddess. And that's why you've got a lot of girls getting pregnant, living terrible council-flat lives." As Sinead, Mother Bernadette Maria O'Connor MA, she claims she is now qualified to officiate at births, marriages and funerals, and to take confession. "I've been given special holy orders to work with the dying and those that are labelled insane" - she smiles - "like myself." So far, she has conducted a version of Mass on six occasions, in Lourdes - "that was just me and the bishop and my boyfriend" - and at Cox's church in County Offaly, with members of his family. Allegations in the press that she had "bought" her supposed priesthood with a pounds 150,000 donation to Cox are false, she says. The money was intended as a charitable donation; but, in the wake of the controversy, she has now withdrawn it and the money will instead go towards setting up her own charity, called Universal Mother, which will involve her opening a healing centre. Talking with O'Connor, one is left in no doubt about her sincerity or her conviction; only about her equilibrium. The instability, the depression, the self-loathing - all the things that have troubled her over the years - have been swept away, she suggests, by the simple act of "ordination". Perhaps faith is able to work such miracles; then again, one fears, perhaps it is not. The press, she says, has created a caricature of her as "the pathetic victim. That's what they do to women. It's what they did to Princess Diana and to Paula Yates - to mock people for being emotionally vulnerable is just the epitome of evil." But she's not a victim: "I'm like one of those clowns with the wobbly bits at the bottom - you can punch and kick them and they just bounce back up again. I don't care what anyone thinks of me." She fingers her dog collar, which she intends to wear when she's performing on stage - "I'll always wear it." She smiles. "Except that my boyfriend will occasionally ask me if I'll put on a dress and behave just like a woman"