http://www.christorchaos.com/?q=content/bishop-robert-fidelis-mckenna-op-ripI was informed of the death of the last Dominican bishop on the face of this earth, the Most Reverend Robert Fidelis McKenna, O.P., around 5:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, yesterday afternoon, nearly four hours after His Excellency had died at the age of eighty-eight years, five months, seven days.
We were privileged to know and to be served by Bishop McKenna, who was one of the most truly humble, self-effacing men we have ever met, a true son of Saint Dominic de Guzman, the founder of the Order of Preachers to whom Our Lady gave her Most Holy Rosary. Indeed, Bishop McKenna preached often on the Holy Rosary and its efficacy, explaining that Our Lady’s Most Holy Rosary was her sword and her Brown Scapular was her shield. His love of Our Lady and his devotion to her Most Holy Rosary permeated everything he did as a priest of the Order of Preachers even well before he became the founding pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in Monroe, Connecticut, offering the very first Mass in the former Stepney Methodist Church that had been purchased by Father Francis Fenton for the Orthodox Roman Catholic Movement on Sunday, January 21, 1973, a fact we learned on that date in 2008 when the Bishop talked about the milestone of the chapel’s thirty-fifth anniversary in his sermon at Holy Mass.
Mere words can never do justice to describe Bishop McKenna’s great and tireless zeal for souls nor to fully communicate the true humility that he exhibited as he, a Successor of the Apostles who was consecrated by Bishop Guerard des Lauriers in Raveau, France, on August 22, 1986, the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, went about such chores as taking out the garbage or vacuuming the floor of his very small office. He made the following remark when I was startled by the fact that I had happened upon him in his office as he was vacuuming: “Doctor Tom, don’t make a virtue out of necessity.” He cracked just the slightest smile as he looked up at me and said this.
Each sermon that His Excellency gave was a catechism lesson in the Faith, helping to fortify the souls of those who drove many, many miles to assist at Holy Mass offered in the unreformed Dominican Rite. Bishop Robert Fidelis McKenna never once relented in his zeal for souls. Saint Fidelis of Sigmaringen, who was put to death by Calvinists on April 24, 1622, must have been praying for his namesake from the time of his ordination on June 5, 1958, the Feast of Saint Boniface, by Amleto Giovanni Cicgonani, who was the Apostolic Delegate to the United States of America from March 17, 1933, to November 14, 1959, to the time of his death yesterday, Wednesday, December 16, 2015, on the Feast of Saint Eusebius, who gave up his life to fight Arianism just as Bishop McKenna had given up everything he had despite intense personal sufferings from various ailments and afflictions to fight the Modernism of the “Second” Vatican Council and the “magisterium” of the postconciliar “popes.”
Although I am under doctor’s orders to get rest as he says that my body still has another month or so to heal from hernia repair surgery seventeen days ago, I do want to relate two brief stories about the Bishop.
The first is not so much a story as it is a remembrance of one of his favorite ways to describe the false ecclesiology of the Society of Saint Pius X: “The SSPX wants to have their pope and eat him, too.”
The second is a story he himself told from the pulpit on Sunday, February 14, 2010, and it is worth repeating again even though I had included it on this site over seventy months ago now.
Bishop McKenna began his story by saying that it had been fifty years ago that very day, February 14, that a Dominican priest in residence at Saint Catherine of Siena Priory on the East Side of Manhattan was awakened around 4:00 a.m. by explosions that sounded to him as though the Russians were bombing the City of New York. He got up and then knelt by his bedside to pray, thinking that the end was near.
The priest got up from prayer to look out of his window to see that a nearby building was on fire. Flames were shooting from the top of the building. The priest then got dressed to go out to see if he was needed to administer the sacraments to anyone who might have been injured in the explosions, which he learned at the scene had been caused by exploding propane tanks on the top of what turned out to be a building under construction and thus unoccupied. The tanks were being shot up into the air before landing in the East River. After finding that his brother Dominican priests were already on the scene and that no one had been injured, the priest returned to sleep for a few hours.
It was later in the evening of that day, at a time when it was pitch dark out and following a good deal of snow, that the priest, who was dressed in black, decided to walk a few blocks to another Dominican parish to go to confession to a priest there. The sidewalk was very slippery.
The priest, then in his thirty-third year of life, noticed as he was in the middle of crossing a street that a car was coming out of nowhere and turning the corner, heading directly at him at a good clip of speed. The street itself was very slippery. The priest believed that he was going to be killed, figuring that he would be hit by the car and thrown against the wall of a building across the street.
Instinctively, therefore, the priest reached out his arm to brace himself against the impact of the car. At the mere touch of his fingers on the car, however, the vehicle, which was moving rapidly, stopped without skidding on the snow and ice. The priest was stunned as he looked at the driver, who was also stunned. Shaken up by the event, the priest immediately returned to Saint Catherine of Siena Priory to go to confession there.
Bishop McKenna then stunned us when he asked us to join him in a prayer of thanksgiving to God for sparing his life fifty years before, that is, on February 14, 1960, the Feast of Saint Valentine. Bishop McKenna said that he had been living on what he called "borrowed time" ever since.
Please join us in giving thanks to God that Bishop McKenna's life was spared on that day in 1960 so that he could add honor and glory to God at the altar and add grace to the world every time he offered the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We thank Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother for being able to know, if only for a relatively short time, four years between January of 2007 and March of 2011, in comparison to those who knew him and worked with him for four decades, and to be taught by the Most Reverend Robert Fidelis McKenna, O.P., as we express our deep condolences to those who cared for him in his final years and to all those who considered him their spiritual father, a man who helped countless numbers of people to accept the true state of the Church Militant in this time of apostasy and betrayal.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon Him.
May his soul and all of the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for +Bishop Robert Fidelis McKenna, O.P., R.I.P.
(The photograph below was taken by Sharon on Wednesday, October 17, 2007, the Feast of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque in His Excellency’s office after he had received a Catholic woman, now living in Ohio, into the Catholic Church a few years after she had been received by a true priest, since deceased, who had used the worthless conciliar rite of confirmation, in the conciliar structures):
Topic: R.I.P. Bishop McKenna (Read 2096 times)