Career-altering flashpoint: The Associated Press’ Holly Meyer examines O’Connor’s legacy:

More than 30 years later, her “Saturday Night Live” performance and its stark collision of popular culture and religious statement is remembered by some as an offensive act of desecration. But for others — including survivors of clergy sex abuse — O’Connor’s protest was prophetic, forecasting the global denomination’s public reckoning that was, at that point, yet to come. O’Connor, 56, died Wednesday.

The SNL moment stunned David Clohessy, a key early member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. In his 30s at the time, he had only recently recalled the repressed memories of the abuse he suffered. He found O’Connor’s act deeply moving. It was something he and other survivors never thought possible. …

“We were all just deeply convinced that we would go to our graves without ever seeing any public acknowledgment of the horror and without any kind of validation whatsoever,” Clohessy said. “That’s what made her words so very powerful.”

O’Connor paid dearly for criticizing the church, but history proved her right, CNN’s Issy Ronald asserts. Despite the backlash over the “SNL” incident, she had no regrets, People’s David Chiu explains.

O’Connor’s ‘Theology’: Ted Olsen, former executive editor of Christianity Today, mourned the singer-songwriter’s death by noting that he listens to her “Theology” albums at least monthly.

“They’re amazing,” declares Olsen, who wrote a 2007 CT piece on “Why you shouldn’t be surprised that her new album is mostly passages from the Old Testament.”

One more related link: At the Jesuit magazine America, Matthew Cortese writes about “How Sinéad O’Connor taught a Catholic priest how to pray.”