"My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ"
About this Quote
The phrase "torn apart" does double work. It gestures at literal family separation (institutions, adoption, abuse, exile) while also naming the psychic violence of being told that harm is holy. And then she pins the motive with brutal clarity: "for money". Not sin, not human weakness - economics. She’s indicting the machinery behind religious authority, the way piety becomes branding, fundraising, and power-protection. It’s a line that slices through the comforting idea that scandals are aberrations; she frames them as business as usual.
"In the name of Jesus Christ" lands as both accusation and lament. She’s not attacking belief so much as the weaponization of belief, the rhetorical laundering of exploitation through sanctity. The subtext is also self-protective: if her life has been publicly pathologized, she reassigns the diagnosis to the institutions that normalized cruelty.
Context matters: O'Connor’s career is inseparable from her refusal to politely compartmentalize trauma, Irish Catholic dominance, and global hypocrisy - most infamously when she tore the Pope’s photo on live TV, years before the wider public caught up to what she was pointing at. This sentence is the throughline: outrage as clarity, not spectacle.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
O'Connor, Sinead. (2026, January 16). My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/my-story-is-the-story-of-countless-millions-of-90667/
Chicago Style
O'Connor, Sinead. "My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/my-story-is-the-story-of-countless-millions-of-90667/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/my-story-is-the-story-of-countless-millions-of-90667/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.
