RHODE ISLAND
National Catholic Reporter

by Jason Berry | Oct. 23, 2012

The Legion of Christ drew $2.19 million last year from a $28 million charitable trust that it controls, thanks to Gabrielle Mee, a wealthy widow who spent her final years as a consecrated woman in Regnum Christi, the order’s lay wing. An orthodox Catholic, she was unaware that Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legion, had out-of-wedlock children or that the Vatican had banished him from ministry.

The Timothy J. Mee Charitable Trust — established by the late husband of Gabrielle Mee, who died in 2008 — paid the scandal-battered Legion $2.19 million in contributions, gifts and grants last year, according to the trust’s 990 form, a public record that private foundations file with the IRS.

The Timothy Mee trust’s $28.27 million net value is slightly less than half of the $60 million at issue in…