Robert Fidelis McKenna, O.P. (born July 8, 1927) is a Dominican bishop residing at Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Monroe, Connecticut since 1973. He is known for his traditionalist Catholic positions and is an advocate of sedeprivationism. He is also known from the Fox TV-movie The Haunted, which is about the Smurl haunting where McKenna conducted two exorcisms.
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He was ordained a Roman Catholic priest for the Dominican Order in 1958 by Cardinal Amleto Giovanni Cicognani. After the Second Vatican Council, while working as a translator and scientific researcher for his religious Order, he became increasingly concerned with the ramifications of the Vatican reforms, and finally removed himself from those in his Order with whom he felt he could no longer associate in good conscience. He continued as a Dominican priest while joining other priests in the Orthodox Roman Catholic Movement (O.R.C.M. or ORCM), a traditionalist Catholic organization founded by Fr. Francis E. Fenton that represented itself as preserving authentic Roman Catholicism from what its members viewed as radical modernist changes in doctrine and liturgy. The ORCM still exists as a corporation for legal purposes, but has long ceased to be used to represent a religious organization. As early as his October 1985 issue of Catholics Forever, Fr. McKenna referred to his involvement historically as "in ORCM days".
Fr. McKenna was consecrated a bishop on August 22, 1986 in Raveau, France by Mgr. Michel Guerard des Lauriers, O.P, one of the bishops consecrated by Bishop Ngo Dinh Thuc without papal mandate.
Bishop McKenna also consecrated Rev. Donald Sanborn as Bishop; Bishop Sanborn, who has his seminary in Florida, also works with Bishop Dolan and Fr. Cekada in West Chester OH at St. Gertrude the Great.
Since being consecrated a bishop, McKenna has been one of the main promoters of the Cassiciacum Thesis developed by his consecrator, which states that the papal claimants since Paul VI have not been true popes due to their public heresies, but have only been papa materialiter. According to McKenna, by teaching that men have a "natural right" to worship as they see fit, the successors of John XXIII have attempted to put the heresy of ecumenism in place of Catholicism. Referring to this heresy as "a spiritual insanity," he wrote in, On Keeping Catholic:
Now while the Popes of Vatican II, including the present Benedict XVI, can function on the purely natural level in running the Church as an organization or legal corporation, they have on the supernatural level - in view of their spiritual madness - no divine authority to speak for the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ or to govern the faithful in His name; no power, that is to say, to function precisely as the Vicar of Christ for so long as this insanity continues. They and the bishops under them, blindly following them, are lacking the jurisdiction they would otherwise have under normal circumstances. We must simply ignore them and carry on as best as we can without them.[1]
Concerning the bishops who are in union with Rome, McKenna published a similar view in 1980:
Practically all bishops who are not definitely heretics are at least gravely suspect of heresy by reason of the sacrilegious outrages they have tolerated in their dioceses. As a consequence, they have either lost their jurisdiction or possess a very doubtful jurisdiction, and Canon Law itself expressly supplies priests jurisdiction in such cases.[2]
Although he is sometimes classified as a sedevacantist or a sedeprivationist, McKenna considers himself to be a Roman Catholic bishop just dealing with the Church crisis of the present day.
Bishop McKenna was also a noted exorcist. While performing exorcisms is not in itself noteworthy for a Roman Catholic priest, some of his cases were also investigated by psychic researchers such as the Warrens, and some of his cases have been sensationalized against his wishes. He attempted exorcisms in the Smurl haunting case, which case was described in various books and in the Fox TV-movie The Haunted.[3][4] Another exorcism he performed in 1985 in Warren, Massachusetts was featured in the Boston Herald and later recounted by the same reporters in the book Satan's Harvest.[5] Furthermore, he believes that "the official establishment does not believe that the devil exist anymore... they do not believe, and when they do, they don't want to get involved."[6] Due to his advanced age, McKenna has given up taking any more cases.
| Episcopal lineage | |
| Consecrated by: | Guerard des Lauriers |
| Consecrator of | |
|---|---|
| Bishop | Date of consecration |
| J. Vida Elmer | July 2, 1987 |
| Richard F. Bedingfeld | December 17, 1987 |
| Oliver Oravec | October 21, 1988 |
| Francis Slupski | May 20, 1999 |
| Geert Jan Stuyver | January 16, 2002 |
| Donald J. Sanborn | June 19, 2002 |
| Robert L. Neville | April 28, 2005 |