Robert McKenna | |
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| Orders | |
| Ordination | 1958 by Amleto Giovanni Cicognani |
| Consecration | 22 August 1986 by Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 8 July 1927 Danville, Illinois, USA |
| Died | 16 December 2015 (aged 88) |
| Nationality | American |
| Denomination | Traditionalist Catholic |
| Profession | Bishop andexorcist |
Robert Fidelis McKenna (8 July 1927 – 16 December 2015) was an AmericanCatholicTraditionalist Catholic bishop and priest of theDominican order who was excommunicated from theCatholic Church. He was known for histraditionalist Catholic positions and was an advocate ofsedeprivationism. McKenna was one of the leaders of theOrthodox Roman Catholic Movement (ORCM).[1] He was also known from theFox TV-movieThe Haunted, which is about theSmurl haunting where McKenna conducted twoexorcisms.
He was ordained a Catholic priest for theOrder of Preachers in 1958 by CardinalAmleto Giovanni Cicognani.
After theSecond 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 his Order. He continued as a Dominican priest while joining others in theOrthodox Roman Catholic Movement (ORCM), a traditionalist Catholic organization founded by Fr. Francis E. Fenton that represented itself as preserving authentic Catholicism from what its members viewed as radical modernist changes in doctrine and liturgy.
McKenna was consecrated a bishop on 22 August 1986, inRaveau,France, by the French sedeprivationist BishopMichel-Louis Guérard des LauriersOP.[2]
He died at the age of 88 on 16 December 2015.[3] The sermon at his funeral was preached byDonald Sanborn.[4]
McKenna participated in a number of exorcisms and worked for many years with demonologist Dave Considine and Rama Coomaraswamy, M.D. Some of his cases were also investigated by psychic researchers such asthe Warrens. He attempted exorcisms in theSmurl haunting case, which case was described in various books and in the Fox TV-movieThe Haunted.
Another exorcism he performed in 1985 inWarren, Massachusetts was featured in theBoston Herald and later recounted by the same reporters in the bookSatan's Harvest.[5] A spokesperson for theArchdiocese of Hartford, said that whatever ritual was performed on the boy was not sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church and therefore could not be called an exorcism.[6]
Furthermore, he believes that "the official establishment does not believe in the Devil ... but the Devil believes in them. They do not believe, and when they do, they don't want to get involved."[7]
According to McKenna, the successors ofPope Pius XII have attempted to put the heresy of ecumenism in place of Catholicism by teaching that men have a natural right to worship as they see fit. Referring to this alleged heresy as "a spiritual insanity", he wrote in an article "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.[8]
Concerning the bishops who are in union with Rome, he 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.[9]
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