He was ordained a 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, a traditionalist Catholic organization founded by Father Francis E. Fenton that represented itself as preserving authentic 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, Father 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 Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục without papal mandate. Bishop McKenna also consecrated Rev. Donald Sanborn as Bishop; Bishop Sanborn, who has his seminary in Florida, also works with Bishop Daniel Dolan and Fr. Anthony Cekada in West Chester, Ohio at St. Gertrude the Great. Bishop McKenna retired from his duties at Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Monroe, Connecticut due to health concerns. He resided in Michigan until his death.
Exorcist
Bishop McKenna participated in a number of alleged exorcisms and worked for many years with demonologist Dave Considine and Fr. Rama Coomeraswamy M.D. Some of his cases were also investigated by psychic researchers such as the Warrens. He attempted exorcisms in the Smurl haunting case, which case was described in various books and in the Fox TV-movie The Haunted. 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. A spokesperson for the Archdiocese 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. 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."
Public stand
Since being consecrated a bishop, McKenna had 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.
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.
Although he is sometimes classified as a sedevacantist or a sedeprivationist, McKenna considered himself to be a Catholic bishop just dealing with the Church crisis of the present day.
Death
Bp. McKenna died at the age of 88 on December 16, 2015.
Audiovisual material
includes images from his chapel and nuns, while McKenna describes the exorcism.
