Records Show Woman Gave Legion of Christ $60 Million over 20 Years

By Dave Altimari
The Hartford Courant
February 17, 2013

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-legion-of-christ--files-20130217,0,5040599.story

As Gabrielle Mee lay on her deathbed in a Rhode Island hospital in 2008, the leader of the Connecticut-based Legion of Christ asked her bank to transfer $400,000 from her personal bank account to the church "as soon as possible."

The bank complied, and the money was the last of nearly $60 million that Mee either gave or bequeathed to the religious organization over nearly 20 years, court records unsealed late last week in Rhode Island indicate.

The documents were part of a now-dismissed lawsuit filed by Mary Lou Dauray, Mee's niece, in an attempt to overturn Mee's will, which left everything the woman had to the church group.

Among the thousands of pages of documents are depositions from some of the highest-ranking members of the Legion, bank records, and personal letters that the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the now-disgraced founder, wrote to Mee through the years.

The lawsuit claimed that the group defrauded Mee, in part by keeping from her that Maciel had fathered at least one child and had been accused of abusing seminarians. A judge dismissed the suit late last year, ruling that Dauray did not have legal standing. Dauray has appealed that ruling.

The Vatican took over the operations of the Legion of Christ in 2010 following an investigation that determined that Maciel had sexually molested seminarians and fathered as many as three children by two women.

The lawsuit alleged that if Mee had known fully about Maciel, she would not have donated so much money and would not have made the Legion sole beneficiary of her husband's charitable trust worth millions.

The unsealed documents show that high-ranking members of the church were aware as early as 2004 that Maciel might have fathered at last one child. The records show that the group's second-highest ranking member, the Rev. Luis Garza, obtained a birth certificate in 2006 of one of Maciel's children.

The documents provide the first complete accounting of the money that Mee gave to the Legion since 1989, when she made her first donation of $1 million to help build a seminary in Rome.

It was after Maciel heard about that donation that he wrote his first letter to Mee, sent from Mexico City in August of 1989, records show.

"I want you to know that I am very deeply moved and very grateful for this extraordinary gift," Maciel wrote. "I would very much like to meet you sometime to thank you personally."

Maciel did meet with Mee several times, either at the Legion's seminary in Cheshire or at the Rhode Island headquarters of Regnum Christi, the lay movement of the church that Mee joined in the early 1990s.

Once she became a "consecrated" member of the Regnum Christi, Mee turned over a condominium in Narragansett, R.I., and her former home in Smithfield, R.I., to the church. She also changed her will to give everything that her husband, Timothy Mee, had left her to the Legion of Christ.

An attorney for Dauray said that the Legion used Mee as a "personal piggy bank." Financial records unveiled as part of the lawsuit show that Mee donated money to the church group every year from 1989 to 2008.

Most were donations that went into the organization's general fund, according to the Rev. Anthony Bannon, who was the leader of the Legion of Christ in North America for many years and also was granted power of attorney by Mee over her finances, records show.

It was Bannon, using his power of attorney, who wrote to Fleet Bank in May 2008 to transfer $400,000 from Mee's account to the church, records show. In a deposition, Bannon said he did so without Mee's signature because she was "incapacitated at the time." Mee died on May 16 at age 96. The funds were transferred about four days before she died, the records indicate.

In the deposition, Bannon repeated several times that he was "following her wishes" to take money from Mee's account quarterly rather than once a year.

Bannon and other Legion of Christ officials who were deposed all said that no one ever pressured Mee to give money to the group. Mee went to Mass every day since she was 12, records show.

In a deposition that Mee gave in 2001, when the Legion of Christ sued Fleet Bank for not releasing funds from several of the Mee trusts, she made it clear that she loved the Legion and wanted to do whatever she could to help it.

"They've never asked me for money at any time that I have been with them,'' Mee said. "When I knew what was going on, I told them that I could help if they needed it."

Contact: daltimar@courant.com