RHODE ISLAND
National Catholic Reporter
Jason Berry | Jan. 22, 2014
A Rhode Island federal magistrate judge has given a green light for a man’s lawsuit against the Legion of Christ seeking more than $1 million for the alleged defrauding of his father’s estate.
The case moves forward at the same moment the Legion is gathered in Rome in an effort to reconstitute itself in the aftermath of the scandals of its discredited founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado. For some longtime critics, who originally brought to light widespread corruption within the Legion, the ruling is the latest indication that serious questions remain about the Legion and the Vatican process employed to revive the order.
The suit accuses the Legion of preying on James Boa-Teh Chu and defrauding his son, Paul, of an estate with annuities valued between $1 million and $2 million. The suit seeks $10 million in punitive damages.
Paul Chu, an only child, was studying in the Hartford, Conn., diocesan seminary when his father, a Yale professor of mechanical engineering who retired in 2003, went into a mental and physical decline, according to court documents.
Born 1924 in mainland China, Boa-Teh Chu immigrated to America as a young man, and as a professor of mechanical engineering taught at Brown University and State University of New York before taking a faculty position at Yale. A deeply devout Catholic, he lost his wife in 1993 and died in 2009 at age 85. His final years were marked by “difficulty assimilating new data, mental tics, fixations and obsessions, some of which exhibited through bizarre hoarding and collecting,” according to a summary by U.S. Magistrate Judge Patricia Sullivan, released Jan. 13.
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