On October 3, 1992, the Irish singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor appeared as a musical guest on the American television programme Saturday Night Live (SNL) and staged a protest against the Catholic Church. While performing a rendition of Bob Marley's 1976 song "War", she held a photograph of Pope John Paul II up to the camera, tore it to pieces, said "fight the real enemy", and threw the pieces to the floor.

In an interview a few weeks after the performance, O'Connor said she held the Catholic Church responsible for physical, sexual and emotional abuse she had suffered as a child. She also said that the Church had destroyed "entire races of people", and that Catholic priests had been beating and sexually abusing children for years. O'Connor's performance took place nine years before John Paul II publicly acknowledged child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

The protest triggered hundreds of complaints from viewers. It attracted criticism from institutions including the Catholic Church and the Anti-Defamation League, and celebrities including Joe Pesci and Madonna, who both mocked the performance on SNL later that season. Two weeks after her SNL appearance, O'Connor was booed at the 30th-anniversary tribute concert for Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Nevertheless, O'Connor said she did not regret her act, as she felt miscast in the role of a pop star: she saw herself instead as a protest singer. After the Catholic Church's cover-up of abuse became public, retrospective opinion toward O'Connor, especially after she died in 2023, shifted in support of her. For example, in 2020 Time named O'Connor the most influential woman of 1992 for her protest.