Relatives Challenge Woman’s Will Leaving Estate To
Catholic Church Order
Hartford Courant, June 28, 2009
By Dave Altimari
When Gabrielle Mee died in May 2008 on the Greenville, R.I., campus of the Legionaries of Christ, her caregivers mourned the loss of the order’s “grandmother.”
Leaders of the secretive Roman Catholic order rushed from Connecticut and New York to pay their final respects. Six of her consecrated “sisters” carried her plain wooden coffin to the cemetery where she was buried next to her husband, Timothy Mee.
None of her family attended the service for Mee, who was 96 when she died. In fact, many of her relatives didn’t find out that Gabrielle Mee had died until nearly a year later when a letter from the Legionaries’ lawyer arrived, notifying them that the Probate Court in North Smithfield, R.I., was about to administer her will.
What relatives discovered is that since the mid-1990s Gabrielle Mee steadily turned over real estate and money — upwards of $7.5 million — to the Legionaries of Christ, which is headquartered in Orange, Conn.
Stunned family members are accusing the church of taking advantage of a lonely, deeply religious older woman. They have hired a Providence attorney to contest her will.
“As I started to research who this group really was it became clear that this is a cult that kept her isolated,” said Mary Lou Dauray, Mee’s goddaughter.
Although it is difficult to overturn a will, the family is hoping the order’s sex scandal involving its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, will be taken into consideration. The Courant reported in 1997 that Degollado was accused of molesting at least nine boys, aged 10 to 16, in seminaries in Spain and Italy in the 1950s and ’60s.
And just earlier this year it was revealed that Degollado had fathered an illegitimate child, followed by the news that Pope Benedict XVI was ordering a papal investigation of the Legionaries of Christ. Degollado died in 2008 at age 87.
Family members believe that if Gabrielle Mee — who had received Holy Communion every day of her life since she was 12 years old — knew about the sex scandal and Vatican investigation, she would not have made the church her beneficiary. They are hoping to convince the probate judge of that.
“Had she been aware of what is going on with the [order and its leader] there is no way she would have left everything to them,” said Alan Davis, Mary Lou Dauray’s husband.
But for nearly two decades, Mee lived in the religious community and became “very much the holy big sister to the dozens of women she lived with and touched over the years with her joy and piety,” said James Fair, the communications director for Regnum Christi, the Legionaries of Christ’s lay affiliate, which Mee had joined.
His comment was part of a brief statement Fair issued as a reply to questions The Courant had sent to Anthony Bannon, Regnum Christi’s director for North America and the executor of Mee’s will. Fair’s statement did not answer specific questions about how Mee had come to join the group and what the order has done with the millions of dollars she gave the Legionaries.
“Mrs. Mee was a devout Catholic,” Fair’s statement also said. “Several years after her husband’s death, she joined the consecrated women of Regnum Christi, with whom she lived the last 17 years of her life, sharing in their life of deep faith, devotion to Christ and service to the Church.
‘All A Family’
Suzanne Dauray Curry still remembers walking on the beaches of Westerly, R.I., as a little girl visiting the Mees at their summer home.
Timothy Mee was a businessman from Woonsocket and one of the original investors in Fleet Bank.
His beachfront home in Westerly was destroyed in the Hurricane of 1938. His first wife and children drowned in the storm.
He rebuilt the home on the exact spot and in 1948 married Gabrielle Dauray, a lifelong Woonsocket girl. She was the sixth of nine children who grew up in a fatherless home raised by their mother, Mary, with the help of the eldest son, Victor Dauray, who quit school to get a job to help the family survive. Victor would become Suzanne’s grandfather.
“Aunt Gaby often spoke of how much my grandfather gave up caring for his mother and siblings and how proud we should be,” Curry said, describing Gabrielle Mee’s admiration for her older brother. “She always reminded him we would be taken care of in generations to come because we were all a family.”
The Mees were very religious, always attending Mass in Woonsocket. They never had children, and generously contributed to charities.
Timothy Mee died in 1985. In his will he had established the Timothy Mee Charitable Trust, which was to be administered by Fleet Bank and his wife. By 2005 that trust totaled nearly $15 million. He also set up two trusts in his wife’s name, again making Fleet Bank the administrator of the trusts with Gabrielle Mee the beneficiary of any annual proceeds.
On Nov. 7, 1991, in Rome, Gabrielle Mee became a consecrated woman in Regnum Christi.
On its website, Regnum Christi says consecrated women “not only seek to become witnesses to Christ through the total dedication of our time and talents to preaching the Gospel, but also through our free and permanent union with Christ by the promises of poverty, chastity, and obedience.”
It was the same year that the order opened a center for consecrated women in Greenville, R.I., where Gabrielle Mee later lived and eventually died.
Providence attorney Deming Sherman said it was in 1994 when Gabrielle Mee started turning her finances over to the Legionaries. She made the Legionaries the beneficiary of her husband’s charitable trust, meaning that whatever interest the trust earned from its investments was turned over yearly.
She also made the Legionaries the beneficiary of the two trusts in her name and sold the couple’s home in North Smithfield, currently assessed at $523,700, to the church for $1. The church still owns it.
Family members believe it was around 1994 that they started losing contact with her.
“We’d always exchanged Christmas cards, but then all of a sudden we stopped getting replies from her,” Suzanne Curry said. “We just assumed it was because she was getting older and couldn’t write to us anymore, but now I am wondering about that,” she said.
One of the last relatives to visit Gabrielle Mee in Greenville was Jeanne Dauray, whose grandmother Rachel was Gabrielle Mee’s sister.
Dauray spent five days at the Regnum Christi center in 2001 and left “very disturbed” by what she had observed.
“The whole time I spent with Gaby we were never alone; there was always another woman there,” Dauray said. “If anything was brought up in conversation that they didn’t like, they would quickly redirect the conversation to something else.”
Dauray said that Gabrielle Mee wanted to visit her sister Rachel, who was ill. She asked Dauray to help her mail a formal request, but it was denied by the group of priests that ran the religious center.
“I’m not even sure who really made the decision, but we walked into a meeting and they told her it wasn’t a good idea for her to go see her sister,” Dauray said. “Even after Gaby said how disappointed she was, they wouldn’t let her go.”
Dauray said that after she returned home to Stamford, Conn., she got several phone calls and at least one visit from Regnum Christi members trying to get her to join the order.
She talked a few more times to Gabrielle Mee by phone but never visited again.
“The feeling I had was that they had found a cash cow and they were never, ever going to let it go,” Dauray said.
Profitable Relationship
Family members don’t know why Mee started giving money to the Legionaries of Christ.
An obituary posted on the Regnum Christi website doesn’t shed light on how Mee came to be such a devoted follower.
“Mrs. Mee began searching for work of the church that she could support, and got to know the Legionaries of Christ. Upon entering the chapel and seeing that the tabernacle was in the center, she realized that the Legion was a faithful religious congregation and became a benefactor.”
It was to be a profitable relationship for the Legionaries.
In December 2000, 89-year-old Mee changed her will, leaving her estate to the Legionaries of Christ and appointing Bannon the executor of her will. At that point she left Fleet Bank as a co-executor.
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.
The few public records available show that in the past three years the order has received more than $3.7 million in interest income from the Timothy Mee trust. The second trust in Gabrielle Mee’s name still exists, although neither Sherman nor the family have any idea how much money is in it and whether it will be part of her probate case.
Mee fell ill in April 2008. According to the obituary from the church website, “she entered the hospital, always accompanied by two consecrated women.” The Most Rev. Thomas Tobin, bishop of Providence, visited her; the Rev. Alvaro Corcuera, who had taken over as director of the Legionaries order from the disgraced Degollado, sent a card.
Mee returned to the women’s center on May 7 and died nine days later.
Within hours of her death, former Providence Bishop Louis Gelineau stopped at the center to pay his last respects.
“I wonder how many people get personal visits from bishops and who have the leaders of this worldwide organization interested in their wills?” Suzanne Curry said. Documents filed in the probate case estimate Mee’s remaining estate to be worth about $58,000, although at least one family member said the order’s attorney told her the estate is worth more than $250,000.
That doesn’t include the second trust in her name in which the Legionaries is the beneficiary. Sherman said that without obtaining a subpoena for bank records there’s no way of knowing how much money is in the trust.
Smithfield Probate Judge F. Monroe Allen has set a meeting on Mee’s estate for July 2.
Family members are expected to ask the judge to hold a full hearing.None of the family is named in the will. Sherman said that would allow him to subpoena bank records and depose people.
The Dauray family — with many members living in Rhode Island — acknowledge that they didn’t try to visit Mee often.
They don’t want the Legionaries to end up with all her money, even if the family doesn’t get any.
“Her money should go to a cause not involved with a cult,” Mary Lou Dauray said. “Not necessarily us but to some charity.”
courant.com/news/nation-world/hc-legionaries-mee-0628.artjun28,0,6998819.story
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