RHODE ISLAND
National Catholic Reporter
by Joshua J. McElwee | Feb. 18, 2013
Editor’s note: Gabrielle Mee, a wealthy Rhode Island widow, directed tens of millions of dollars to the now-disgraced Legion of Christ between 1989 and her death in 2008. Among the volumes of court documents unsealed Friday in a lawsuit brought against the order is a July 12, 2001, deposition of Mee. In that deposition, Mee, who had just turned 90, describes her first contact with the order and her reasons for donating so profusely. This profile of Mee describes the benefactor in her own words as taken from that deposition, unless otherwise specified. See all stories in this series.
For Gabrielle Mee, the Legion of Christ was a group of men uncommonly focused on serving God’s people. In a continuing era of personnel shortages for the Catholic church, they seemed among an ever-decreasing number willing to take up a life of service as priests.
Mee, a native of the small Rhode Island city of Woonsocket on Massachusetts’ southern and western borders, first heard of the Legion in August 1989.
Concerned about a shortage of active priests, she asked a friend at her Narragansett parish: “What are we going to do when we have no more?”
The friend mentioned the order, saying they had a “lot of vocations.”
“Frankly, I caught fire,” Mee said of that interaction. “I thought there must be some priests. So I got home and I called up my banker. I said, ‘Find out everything you can about the Legionaries of Christ.’ ”
Visiting the Legion’s formation center in Cheshire, Conn., sometime after talking with her friend, Mee liked what she saw.
“What impressed me so much was to see a chapel filled with all these young men in their cassocks,” she said.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.