Ex-legion Priest Says He Saw Fiscal Improprieties

By Michelle R. Smith
News 12
February 22, 2013

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/AbuseTracker/Ex-Legion%20priest%20says%20he%20saw%20fiscal%20improprieties

A former priest for the disgraced Roman Catholic religious order the Legion of Christ said in sworn testimony that he witnessed financial improprieties at the order's operation in Rome, including the founder's use of large amounts of cash without any accounting, and said he believed the order's founder and then-second-in-command gave gifts to people at the Vatican to curry favor with them.

A spokesman for the Legion said the testimony concerned things that happened years ago, and that the order's accounting practices are now stricter.

Father Stephen Fichter, who left the Legion in 2000 and is now a parish priest in New Jersey, gave the testimony in a deposition in November 2011 as part of a lawsuit brought by the niece of an elderly Rhode Island widow, Gabrielle Mee. Mee bequeathed $60 million to the Legion before she died in 2008. The deposition was included in thousands of pages released last week after The Associated Press and other news organizations fought to unseal the court records in the case.

Fichter and others have discussed similar allegations in the past about practices by the Legion, a conservative order taken over by the Vatican in 2010 after a church investigation determined that its founder, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, lived a double life: He sexually molested seminarians and fathered three children. But the documents released in the Rhode Island lawsuit contain the first sworn testimony to publicly emerge about the allegations from Legion priests, including from the Rev. Luis Garza, the Legion's former No. 2 official, who is currently in charge of its North American operations.