Second Lawsuit Settled against Disgraced Order Legion of Christ Is Settled

By John Hill
Providence Journal
February 2, 2015

http://www.providencejournal.com/news/content/20150202-second-lawsuit-settled-against-disgraced-order-legion-of-christ-is-settled.ece

A second Rhode Island lawsuit that accused the disgraced Catholic religious order the Legion of Christ of improperly influencing a well-off elderly person’s donations has been settled out of court, according to court documents.

Senior U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux approved a motion dismissing Paul Chu’s suit against the Legion of Christ.

John J. Flanagan, who represented Chu, said he could not comment beyond saying the case was settled “to the satisfaction of the parties.”

The suit involved the estate of James Boa-Teh Chu, a former Brown University mechanical engineering professor who died in 2009 at the age of 85. He had been in declining physical and mental health for several years.

The elder Chu was born in China in 1924. He had converted to Catholicism as a young man and donated generously to Catholic charities throughout his life. In his will he had named the Legion of Christ the beneficiary of several annuities worth between $1 million and $2 million, according to court documents.

As Chu’s son and executor of his estate, Paul Chu challenged that bequest, claiming the Legion abused its role as his father’s spiritual adviser and used undue influence on him in his last years.

The two sides had been working through pretrial motions and research for more than a year. Most of the motions and arguments had centered on whether Chu had the legal standing to bring the suit in the first place.

The charges in Chu’s suit echoed ones made by Mary Lou Dauray, who sued the Legion in state court in 2013 seeking to overturn multimillion dollar bequests to the Legion of Christ by her late aunt, Gabrielle D. Mee.

Dauray charged that the legion made a concerted effort to keep her aunt from finding out that the Legion’s founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, was a sexual predator who had been molesting male seminarians in Legion schools for decades. Despite his order’s vows of celibacy, he was also found to have fathered at least two children by different mothers.

The reports had first surfaced in a series of stories in the Hartford Courant in 1997. After a Vatican investigation of Maciel and the order, then-Pope Benedict XVI issued a communique in 2010 that acknowledged Maciel had committed “very grave and objectively immoral actions” which manifested “a life devoid of scruples and authentic religious meaning.”

Dauray argued that if her devout aunt had known Maciel’s true nature, she never would have left the Legion any bequest from her estate.

Dauray lost in state Superior Court. Though Judge Michael Silverstein ruled that Dauray didn’t have standing to sue because she wasn’t seeking money from her aunt’s estate, he devoted about two thirds of his 39-page decision to cataloging possible instances of fraud and undue influence by Legion officials.

Dauray has appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court, which heard arguments on it in December but hasn’t ruled.

As in the Dauray case, the Legion tried to stop Chu’s lawsuit by challenging his right to bring it. But Lagueux ruled that as executor of his father’s estate, Paul Chu had the legal right to contest the Legion’s claim on the annuities. Lagueux was careful not to rule on the facts of the case, saying that would be for a jury to decide.

Since Maciel’s death in 2008, the Vatican appointed overseers to run the Legion of Christ and supervise a rewriting of its constitution and bylaws, a process that concluded last year.