New suit filed over woman's bequest to Legion of Christ
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A 2013 photo of the Legion of Christ training center for consecrated women in Greenville. It was announced in October, 2014, that the center would close. AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi
Posted May. 17, 2016 at 7:18 PM
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The disgraced Catholic order that successfully fended off a challenge to its control of a deceased woman’s multi-million estate last year is facing a new threat from a national anti-abortion group.
Americans United for Life is asking a Superior Court judge to overturn a Smithfield Probate Court ruling that found AUL waited too long to challenge changes Gabrielle Mee made in her 1991 will, which would have left a tenth of her approximately $60 million estate to the organization. The new version, drawn up in 2000, left all her estate to a religious order called the Legion of Christ. She died in 2008.
AUL wants its day in court to argue that the Legion used fraud and undue influence to induce Mee to change her will in the Legion’s favor.
Mary Lou Dauray, a niece of Mee, made similar arguments in a 2012 lawsuit. She lost when Associate Justice Michael Silverstein ruled that, though Dauray produced significant evidence of fraud and undue influence, because she wasn’t named in the will she didn’t have legal standing to challenge it. That ruling was upheld by the state Supreme Court in January, 2015.
A similar federal lawsuit, filed by the son of a former Brown University professor, was settled out of court in February 2015.
AUL’s problem is timing. Smithfield Probate Judge Jean Fallago ruled in March that AUL knew in 2013 about the old will and the changes made to it when one of Dauray’s lawyers — Bernard Jackvony, who represents AUL — contacted the organization and told them.
AUL “had actual notice of a prior will of Mrs. Mee and their interests therein on Dec. 20, 2013, during the period of time the estate was in fact open and thus had actual notice and opportunity to bring a claim forward but failed to do so,” her order read.
AUL wants to be able to argue that the Legion, described as led by “clandestinely dubious leaders” in Silverstein’s 2014 decision, isolated and misled Mee to get her to change her will.
In 1997, while Mee was still alive, the Hartford Courant published stories with accounts from former Legion seminarians who described the order’s founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, as a sexual predator who molested male seminarians in Legion schools for decades. Despite the order's vows of celibacy, he was also found to have fathered at least two children by different mothers.
In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI issued a communique acknowledging Maciel had committed "very grave and objectively immoral actions" and manifested "a life devoid of scruples and authentic religious meaning."
That was significant because Mee was especially devout in her Catholic faith. She stipulated that none of her investments be in companies that were involved in contraception or produced books, movies or did things that questioned Catholic values. Had she known of Maciel’s depravity, Dauray argued, she would never have allowed her estate to go to his order.
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