Robert Mc Kenna - Public Stand

Public Stand

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.

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 considers himself to be a Roman Catholic bishop just dealing with the Church crisis of the present day.