Sinead Keeps The Faith

By Christopher John Farley/Dublin

Bewley's Cafe would not seem to be a Sinead O'Connor kind of place. Given her reputation as a fiery, outspoken singer, one might expect her to favor shadowy, wrong-side-of-town pubs. Bewley's on Westmoreland Street at first glace seems like the kind of coffeehouse where one might spy Chandler, Monica and the rest of the Friends gang sipping cappuccinos. But in truth, Bewley's is a historic chain in Ireland (James Joyce is claimed as a past patron), so this is where O'Connor, who lives nearby in a three-bedroom apartment, chooses to meet and talk about Faith and Courage, her brilliant new album that's due out next week.

She arrives at the table smiling and carrying a tray of water and tea. O'Connor is small and slight in person but visually arresting. As is often her custom, she has shaved the jet-black hair on her scalp down to about as much stubble as you'd find on George Clooney's cheeks if he went razorless for a long weekend. Her nearly bare head, combined with her wide, bright eyes, gives her a beautiful, birdlike appearance, like something newly hatched. She's wearing brown boots, a blue coat that drapes below her knees, black sunglasses perched on the top of her head and--most significant--a white priest's collar around her neck.

O'Connor's life has had enough twists and turns and zigs and zags to fill up a month of Behind the Music episodes. The priest's collar is her latest zag. After years of criticizing Roman Catholicism (including infamously ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992), she decided last year to be ordained as a priest by controversial Irish clergyman Bishop Michael Cox, the leader of a tiny religious sect. However, O'Connor hasn't quite joined mainstream Catholicism. Cox has come under fire in the past for reportedly offering confession over the telephone. And according to Des Cryan, assistant director of the Catholic Press and Information Office in Dublin, Cox's "holy orders are not recognized by the Catholic Church in Ireland." Besides which, Cryan adds, "the Catholic Church does not ordain women to the priesthood."

O.K., so what else has O'Connor been doing these past few years? Well, O'Connor, whose last full-length album, Universal Mother, was released in 1994, says she's been raising her son Jake, 11, and her daughter Roisin, 3. (O'Connor is divorced, and her children have different fathers, the former by an ex-husband, the latter by an ex-boyfriend.) She has also passed the time deciding which record company she wanted to move to after her old label, Chrysalis, went under (she is now signed to Atlantic). She has gone through years of therapy (she has charged in the past that her mother, now dead, abused her as a child) and says she feels happier than she has ever felt.

"I was 20 when my first record came out," she says. "Now I'm 33, and that gives you a confidence and self-assurance and wisdom and more familiarity with your soul. When you're young, you don't really know what the f___ it is you're aiming at. But the voice inside you gets louder as you get older, and you get more directions from it. So on this album there's more of a sense of self-assurance and more awareness of what it is I'm trying to communicate as an artist."

Faith and Courage is one of the best CDs of the year. On her past albums, O'Connor's songs burned with anger. Her new album, for which she recruited a wide range of producers, including hip-hopper Wyclef Jean, radiates forgiveness, and the music is often as sweet and smooth as strawberries and cream. A few tracks, including The Healing Room, beam with sunny reggae rhythms. The album is dedicated to "all Rastafari people." In one song, What Doesn't Belong to Me, O'Connor sings from the perspective of God, rejecting the self-segregation in the world: "I'm Irish, I'm English, I'm Muslim, I'm Jewish/I'm a girl, I'm a boy/and the goddess meant for me only joy." On another track, The Lamb's Book of Life, O'Connor becomes Ireland itself, running from history and searching for redemption in America: "I know that I have done many things/To give you reason not to listen to me/...Words can't express how sorry I am."

Even when taking on the guises of God and Ireland, of course, O'Connor seems to be singing about herself. When she writes, the music flows from some deep, hidden spring. "I don't ever sit down and try to write songs," she says. "I believe they write themselves and that they're in the air and in your soul. I start hearing them inside myself, and I don't make any effort; I just walk around for a month or so and let the song sing itself inside of me and then usually it's complete before I try and sit down to work out the chords."

But back to the question of the day: What's the deal with her becoming a priest?

"If you're going to put yourself in the position of criticizing something, then you must feel that you can do a better job," she says. "Well, if you feel you could do a better job, then join the organization and do what you can to change it. I do believe in not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are things that need to be cleaned out within the church, but underneath all of that there's a beautiful baby, this beautiful truth."

She says her priest name is Mother Bernadette Mary. And, she adds, her exact title is now archdeacon. "Basically, I do all the things that other priests do, allowing for the fact that I have two children," she says. "Obviously my children come first. So I do what I can. [But] I don't do marriages. The reason I don't do marriages is that people tend to want me to do them because I'm a pop star. It's the Al Green syndrome--everyone wants Al Green to marry them because he's Al Green."

So is she celibate?

"I have a huge calling toward celibacy, which will probably ultimately be the way I'll go," says O'Connor. "Obviously I am a very sexual person, and that's why it's a struggle." O'Connor opens up her jacket to reveal her sleek figure. "I do insist on wearing very feminine and feminine-cut priest gear," she says. "And I don't feel that being celibate means I have to cut off my sexuality, because that's my life force."

O'Connor says No Man's Woman, the first single off her new album, is actually about celibacy. A few other songs, however, deal boldly with love and lust. On Daddy I'm Fine, O'Connor cries out about feeling "sexy underneath the lights" and yearning to have sex with "every man in sight." Her newfound calling clearly hasn't dampened her rock-'n'-roll spirit. O'Connor may be a priest, but she's no nun.