R.I. high court hears arguments over $30-million bequest to Legion of Christ

By John Hill Journal
Providence Journal
December 09, 2014

http://www.providencejournal.com/news/content/20141209-r.i.-high-court-hears-arguments-over-30-million-bequest-to-legion-of-christ.ece

Gabrielle Mee

Snow covers the grounds of the Mater Ecclesiae College in Greenville, R.I., Friday Feb. 15, 2013. The facility previously was home to Gabrielle Mee, who bequeath $60 million to the Legion of Christ, a secretive and now-disgraced Roman Catholic order.

PROVIDENCE — A lawyer for the niece of a woman who left $30 million to the disgraced Legion of Christ was before the state Supreme Court Tuesday, asking the justices to find his client has a legal right to challenge her aunt’s bequest.

But lawyers for the Legion were there as well, arguing that under state law the niece doesn’t have the needed legal standing to file a lawsuit against her aunt’s will.

The fight is over the estate of Gabrielle Mee, a North Smithfield widow who died in 2008, leaving an estimated $30 million to organizations and trusts that benefit the Legion of Christ. The Legion, a religious order dedicated to training seminarians for the priesthood, was scandalized by revelations that the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, who founded the order in 1941, molested young seminarians for decades and fathered multiple children.

Bernard A. Jackvony, representing the niece, Mary Lou Dauray, said his client wants to sue the order for unduly influencing her aunt, with the hope of taking the money left the Legion and donating it to other religious charities more deserving of her aunt’s generosity. Dauray has disavowed any claim to the money for herself.

Joseph Avanzato, representing the Legion, said she can’t because, as Superior Court Associate Justice Michael Silverstein found in 2012, state law says only “interested parties” can contest wills. An interested party is someone who has a financial interest in the handling of the will.

That was where Dauray’s promise that she was not filing the suit for her own benefit worked against her. Because she had disavowed any financial interest in the will, Silverstein ruled, that disqualified her as an interested person under the law.

Jackvony, said his client has standing to challenge the request because the Legion benefited from using undue influence on Mrs. Mee and that it shouldn’t profit from its improper behavior.

“The standing is the wrong that was done to Mrs. Mee,” he told the justices.

Mee spent the last 17 years of her life in a Legion-sponsored residence, where the Legion oversaw the details of her life, even deciding if and when she could visit out-of-state relatives. The Rev. Anthony Bannon, the Legion’s territorial director for North America and Mrs. Mee’s spiritual adviser, also had her power of attorney to spend her money as he saw fit.

While she lived, she donated millions of dollars to the Legion and often referred to Maciel as a “nearly saint.”

Dauray also wants to sue Fleet Bank, later Bank of America, which was supposed to be watching over Mee’s charitable trusts, Jackvony said, while at the same time the bank was doing millions a year in business with the Legion.

Though Silverstein ruled against Dauray’s standing claim, nearly two-thirds of his 39-page decision catalogued what he saw as possible instances of fraud and undue influence.

“The transfer of millions of dollars worth of assets — through will, trust and gifts — from a steadfastedly spiritual, elderly woman to her trusted but clandestinely dubious religious leaders raises a red flag to this court…,” he wrote.

In 1997, stories in the Hartford Courant quoted former seminarians by name who accused Maciel of molesting them over decades. It was later revealed that he fathered three children with two women. In 2005 he stepped down from leadership of the Legion and retired to a life of reflection and prayer. He died in January 2008 at age 87.

The Vatican issued a communiqué in 2010 that said Maciel had committed “real crimes” that showed a life “devoid of scruples and authentic religious meaning.”

Mee’s will forbade the trusts she set up from buying stock in companies that performed abortions or developed contraceptives or entertainment companies that produced pornography or materials that contradicted church teachings.

Jackvony said Mee would have been outraged by Maciel’s actions and would never have given her assets to such an man.

He said the court could find the parts of Mee’s will that gave her estate to the order to have been the product of improper influence and void them. That would leave the bulk of Mee’s estate unassigned, and Dauray would have standing in that situation, he argued.