Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [94]
Christopher Kunze’s family had flown down to Mexico City for his ordination in 1994. He walked in file with fifty-three other Legionaries wearing white robes, each in turn pausing before Father Maciel for the ritual embrace in procession to the altar for a bow and a blessing by the papal nuncio, Archbishop Girolamo Prigione. The men lay prostrate, forming a vast white semicircular fan in symbolic obedience as forty thousand people in the domed stadium looked on. The Legion took out a half-page advertisement in El Universal and six other Mexico City dailies on December 5, 1994, featuring a photograph of Maciel kissing John Paul’s ring and an open letter from the pope calling him “an efficacious guide to youth,” in celebration of Maciel’s fifty years as a priest.
In 1995 one of Kunze’s twin sisters, Elizabeth, joined the Movement, as Regnum Christi members called it. A former retail buyer with Neiman Marcus, she was twenty-nine, recently split from a boyfriend, hungering for a life with more meaning. “My parents divorced after my ordination,” Chris reflects. “I think that had something to do with Lizzie’s decision to join.” She began her immersion in Regnum Christi in Wakefield, Rhode Island.
THE COURTING OF GABRIELLE MEE
The Legion’s Rhode Island expansion was built on the legwork of Irish-born Father Anthony Bannon. Bannon oversaw Regnum Christi in North America from the Connecticut headquarters; he sent seminarians with priests on fund-raising calls to potential donors. Genvieve Kineke, who joined Regnum Christi in the midnineties, recalls a Bannon visit: “We’d break into groups, brainstorm, and then give a report on projected growth. We had about twenty women at the time, although some women from Massachusetts joined us for that event. Rhode Island is quirky and parochial. You can get around the state in an hour and a half, but people won’t go to Providence without an overnight bag. Rhode Islanders looked upon Regnum Christi with suspicion. Our numbers were low. I gave a summary presentation, outlining these human obstacles, laced with humor. Bannon gave me the look of death. He was furious. I sat down with my tail between my legs.”
Bannon and another Irish priest, Owen Kearns, “were like a road team, raising money and seeking recruits,” says Kineke. “Things took off in the 1980s. They built a new wing for the novitiate in Cheshire, Connecticut, thanks to a seven-figure donation from [Reagan administration CIA director] William Casey and his wife. The Legion installed a plaque honoring their support.”
Bannon arranged with Bishop Louis Gelineau of Providence and Mrs. Gabrielle Mee to host a reception for the Legion in March 1990 at the Narragansett home of former governor John Joseph Garrahy and his wife, Marguerite. Gabrielle Mee and Marguerite Garrahy attended daily Mass together. “This announcement and endorsement by the diocese was critical to the [Legion’s] securing of funds to purchase a facility,” observed the Rhode Island Catholic. In 1991 the Legion acquired a former convent in Wakefield, which became a Regnum Christi girls’ school, and two other religious estates. Overbrook Academy in Warwick Neck, a middle school for girls from Latin America and Spain, had a $35,000 tuition in 2009.24
With high tuitions and low faculty salaries, Legion schools generated revenue for operating expenses in Rome, according to several ex-Legionaries. The widow Mee was a breakthrough in the Legion’s growth. A daily communicant since childhood, Gabrielle Dauray was thirty-seven and childless when she married Timothy Mee, a wealthy widower. The year was 1948. Each had a trail of sorrows. Timothy’s wife and children died when a hurricane destroyed their beach house ten years earlier. Gabrielle, the sixth of nine children,