Msgr. Frederick “Fred” Kriekenbeek

His life

Frederick Kriekenbeek was born in Cabanatuan on 12 April 1932, to a Filipino mother and a British father. As a student he was an active apostle of Catholic Action. In March 1950 he graduated valedictorian from the high school of the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, and that June he was awarded a scholarship to Harvard.

At Harvard, a daily communicant and devoted to Mary, he met ideas and ideologies that challenged his faith, and by God’s grace worked out his own answers. The Community’s history sees there the first elements of the spirituality, vision and mission he would later give to Mary’s Little Children. He studied at Harvard Law School before choosing the priesthood instead, and was ordained on 2 February 1961 at St John’s Seminary in Massachusetts.

His ministry

He became a pioneer of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the Philippines — a movement of Catholics who pray expectantly for the Holy Spirit to heal and to renew — and one of Cebu’s first exorcists: a priest appointed by the Church to pray its prayers of deliverance for people in deep spiritual distress.

In 1965 Julio Cardinal Rosales decided not to release him to the growing Mission Society of the Philippines. The Community’s history calls that decision the work of divine providence: it kept him in Cebu, where the communities he founded would grow.

In Cebu he served as pastor of St Joseph the Worker Parish in Tabunok, Talisay City, and at Sto. Rosario Parish in Cebu City, and led Legion of Mary and charismatic prayer groups. He was spiritual director of the Catholic Charismatic Communities of Cebu, both parish-based and covenanted, Episcopal Vicar for Catholic Education and Catechesis, and for some years the Archbishop’s vicar for the charismatic communities. Cardinal Vidal gave him authority to pray the Church’s rite of exorcism, and in 2019 Archbishop Palma named him a founding member of the Archdiocese of Cebu Office of Deliverance and Exorcism.

The communities he founded

Five communities trace themselves to him. He founded the Living the Gospel Community, sisters, in 1974, canonically approved by Rome in 1995; Mary’s Little Children Community in 1998; and Mary’s Missionaries for Evangelization in 2009. The Community’s history explains the January and April 1998 dates recorded in its founding documents. He helped to found Mary Queen of Heaven Missionaries, whose beginnings date from 1996 and which was made a public association in 2003, and was co-founder of Mary’s Immaculate Heart Missionaries in 2020 — both communities of women religious who care for survivors of abuse and trafficking.

Cardinal Vidal first established Mary Queen of Heaven Missionaries, Mary’s Little Children Community and Mary’s Missionaries for Evangelization as Pious Unions. The Community’s history credits this fruitfulness to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which grew in Cebu from the early 1970s and gave rise to many charismatic and religious communities.

His death

He died in Cebu City on 26 September 2022, aged ninety. His body lay for a time in the chapel of the mother house in Tabunok, and on 1 October 2022, after the funeral Mass, he was buried at the Living the Gospel Community mother house chapel in Mantalongon, Barili, Cebu.

What people say about the Community he founded is on the Testimonies page.