Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [95]
Gabrielle Mee was a classic Legion target—a devout, wealthy widow with scattered younger relatives. At a 1991 ceremony in Rome she joined Regnum Christi. In Rhode Island, as a consecrated woman, she made a promise of obedience to her superiors. She drew up a will to benefit the Legion. In 1994 she amended her trust, and Fleet amended the Timothy J. Mee Foundation (which had $15 million in assets) as a charitable trust: interest revenues from both were designated for Legion of Christ of North America, Inc.25 Besides $7.5 million gained from the Mee trusts, the Legion borrowed $25 million from Fleet to purchase a corporate complex in Westchester County, New York, for an envisioned university. Mrs. Mee was eighty-nine in December 2000 when she changed her will, leaving the estate to the Legionaries of Christ, and appointed Father Bannon the executor of her will. She named Fleet Bank as coexecutor.
Dave Altimari of the Hartford Courant recounts the next step:
But soon the order and Mee filed a lawsuit against Fleet Bank, disputing how the bank was distributing the funds from her trusts. In 2003 she changed her will again, removing Fleet completely and naming Christopher Brackett, another Legionaries priest, based in Cheshire, as the co-executor.
One of Gabrielle Mee’s two trusts was dissolved by a court order in 2003 with the remaining funds—more than $2.1 million—turned over to the Legionaries, records show. In June 2003, the Legionaries became the sole owners of a condominium she owned in Narragansett, R.I., assessed at more than $850,000.26
The lawsuit with Fleet was settled out of court. As Mee lost contact with her family, a niece named Jeanne Dauray began to worry. In 2001 Dauray visited the Regnum Christi center. In five days she had not an hour alone with her aunt: another RC woman was always present, diverting the conversations from anything they didn’t like or at odds with the movement. When Mee wanted to visit a sister who was ill, Legion priests said no, disappointing the old lady. Dauray left disillusioned. Regnum Christi members called, beseeching her to join the Movement—the last thing she wanted. She had a few more phone calls with her aunt. “The feeling I had was that they had found a cash cow and they were never, ever going to let it go,” Dauray told Altimari.27 After Mee died, Dauray’s cousin sued to overturn the will.28
Genvieve Kineke withdrew from Regnum Christi when she became pregnant with her fifth child. Soon thereafter, negative news coverage of Maciel, and conversations with other women leaving the Movement, bestirred Genvieve Kineke to launch a remarkable blog: life-after-rc.com.
THE MODEL IMPORTED FROM MEXICO
Maciel’s strategy of targeting wealthy women and oligarchs had been field-tested in Monterrey, the industrial capital of Mexico. Courting elite families, Maciel established private secondary schools, one for boys, one for girls. He exported to America a model for private schools to attract well-heeled families who would join Regnum Christi and give money and their children as future Legionaries or RC women. RC groups discussed Nuestro Padre’s letters. The highest level, lay celibates, lived in communities. Maciel’s order emulated Opus Dei, the order founded in Spain in the 1930s, whose lay celibates, called numeraries, donate portions of their salaries. But where Opus Dei’s founder stressed the sanctification of work by laypeople,29 Maciel’s goal was gaining wealth for the Legion. RC consecrated women, a cheap workforce, revered Nuestro Padre, and were, with designated priests, relentless fund-raisers.
Maciel’s competition in Monterrey