Quick lock up your pictures of the Pope

I found this on an obscure site called the Drudge Report.

DUBLIN, Ireland - Sinead O'Connor says she plans to teach religion after quitting the music business this July.

"I am retiring because I want to train to become a religion teacher of primary school children," the 36-year-old Irish singer said in a letter published Thursday in Dublin's Evening Herald newspaper.

"This will take some years as I also want to raise my own children, so it may be over 10 years 'til I qualify but I intend to make a start."

O'Connor, who has two children, said she also plans to work as a "visiting" church singer, "where I can hide and not be looked at. And maybe sing with a choir. Hire myself out for services. NOT WEDDINGS! Don't believe in them!"
[Full Story]

I wonder just exactly what religion she wants to teach. Here is something from an article published in 1999.

(CWN) Irish pop star Sinead O'Connor - who once famously tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II at a concert in New York-- has been "ordained" to the priesthood by a renegade Catholic bishop.

O'Connor-- who has two children by two different fathers-- was given the name "Mother Bernadette Mary" during last Thursday's ordination ceremony at the Marian shrine of Lourdes in France.

The ceremony was carried out by Irish Bishop Michael Cox, a former policeman who was ordained a bishop of the schismatic sect based in Palmar de Troya in Spain. Bishop Cox recently formed the "Latin Tridentine Church" with dissident priest Father Pat Buckley. Buckley, who was suspended from the priesthood by the former head of the Irish Catholic Church, Cardinal Cahal Daly, was last year illicitly ordained as a bishop by Bishop Cox.

But the two bishops fell out over a gift of IR�150,000 by Sinead O'Connor to Bishop Cox. The pop star said she gave Bishop Cox the money to set up a "healing center" for travellers (gypsies) in the Irish midlands. She also offered to pay for a hernia operation for the bishop.

Bishop Buckley said the donation was "disturbing" and he would be very worried "if the money was attached in even the slightest way to the performance of a sacrament." He said he had no difficulty with the ordination of a woman, but he was concerned that O'Connor had been ordained after only six weeks of theological study.

I remember seeing this before and thought at the time it was pretty strange for a Latin Mass traditionalist to be "ordaining" women. But it is even stranger that his qualms were about her limited theological training and the simony involved.

And here is another story on her temporary abstinence.

"I failed miserably," Sinead O'Connor confessed to Irish television on November 4, reports Agence France Presse. "I meant well by doing the celibacy thing but it doesn't work for me because I need love and affection ..."

The Irish songster vowed a commitment to chastity last April when she became a priestess of the Latin Tridentine Church, a maverick Catholic splinter creed. Irish rebel bishop Michael Cox performed the ordination, rechristening the singer with the nunnish-name of "Mother Bernadette Mary."