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Title: City of God Tom Monaghan's coming Catholic utopia
Source:
Boston Phoenix
URL Source: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston ... eatures/documents/04761831.asp
Published: Jun 17, 2005
Author: ADAM REILLY
Post Date: 2005-06-17 15:09:46 by Mr Nuke Buzzcut
Keywords: Monaghans, Catholic, coming
Views: 58
Comments: 1
City of God BY ADAM REILLY If Tom Monaghan knows this history, he doesn't care. It's a Saturday in March, and Monaghan - founder of Domino's Pizza, former owner of the Detroit Tigers, and self-appointed savior of American Catholicism - is addressing an overflow crowd packed into BC High's gymnasium for the first annual Boston Catholic Men's Conference. Monaghan doesn't seem like a revolutionary: his voice is gentle, his graying hair mussed, and he leans against the podium for support as he speaks. But his rhetoric is incendiary. Catholic schools are failing, Monaghan announces; on key issues (religious observance, sexual behavior, opposition to abortion), graduates of Catholic colleges and universities are actually less orthodox than their co-religionists who attend secular institutions. The problem is especially bad at elite schools, which are academically rigorous but spiritually impoverished. Yet Monaghan brings good news as well. At Ave Maria, the university he's building in southwest Florida, things will be different. In a few years, the median SAT score will be higher than that at any other Catholic institution; even better, the dorms will be single-sex, a quarter of the classes will be taught by "wholly orthodox" priests, and students will be urged to become priests and nuns. Bold talk - but the most dramatic part of Monaghan's speech is yet to come. Ave Maria won't be just a university, he continues. It will also be a new town, built from scratch, in which the wickedness of the world will be kept at bay. "We've already had about 3500 people inquire on our Web site about buying a home there - you know, they're all Catholic," Monaghan says excitedly. "We're going to control all the commercial real estate, so there's not going to be any pornography sold in this town. We're controlling the cable system. The pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms or dispense contraceptives." A private chapel will be located within walking distance of each home. At the stunning church in the center of town, Mass will be said hourly, seven days a week, from 6 a.m. on. "So," Monaghan concludes, with just a hint of understatement, "it'll be a unique town." As he exits the stage, the applause is thunderous. Right now, few people grasp the scope and significance of the Ave Maria project. Monaghan has been well known for years, and his forays into higher education - including Ave Maria University (temporarily located in Naples, Florida) and Ave Maria College and Law School (in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the time being) have received a fair amount of press. But the town of Ave Maria, which may become Monaghan's most significant endeavor, has gone largely unnoticed. The earnest young usher who greeted me at BC High wasn't aware of Monaghan's urban plan; neither, until a few weeks ago, was Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This may be by design. The town's Web site, http://www.avemaria.com, minimizes its religious component, and Monaghan's spokesman, Robert Falls, says it's too early to discuss the way faith will shape life there. (Monaghan did not respond to several requests for comment for this story.) Why the reticence? Maybe because the Ave Maria Tom Monaghan envisions - a Catholic hub in which opportunities for sin will be strictly circumscribed, and from which the truths of orthodox Catholicism will emanate throughout America and the wider world - may be illegal, and will certainly be controversial. If Monaghan's dream comes true, Ave Maria will, in effect, become America's first gated Catholic community. The decades-old efforts of American Catholics to assimilate will be reversed, and American religious pluralism will face a serious challenge. What's more, the ascension of Pope Benedict XVI has many conservative Catholics hopefully anticipating a smaller, purer, more obedient Church. If Ave Maria becomes a reality, it will become the American embodiment of this ideal - a combative bastion of orthodoxy in a sea of dissent and deviance. In other words, the stakes are high. And the less scrutiny Monaghan's utopian plan gets in its early stages, the more likely it is that it will come to pass. Empire building Monaghan's story is a remarkable one, improbable and uplifting enough to inspire a Ron Howard movie. His father died, on Christmas Eve, when Monaghan was four years old; his mother's poverty caused Monaghan to spend much of his childhood in foster homes and a Catholic orphanage. He entered the seminary in ninth grade - moved, Monaghan says, by a desire to "seek the salvation of souls" - but was soon kicked out for unruly behavior. A few years later, he finished last in his high-school class, graduating only after he tearfully begged a teacher to intercede on his behalf. As Monaghan tells it, sheer dumb luck helped transform him from a ne'er-do-well into one of America's most successful executives. ("I owe all my success to stupidity," he likes to say.) After dropping out of the University of Michigan, Monaghan joined the Armed Forces, accidentally enlisting in the Marines instead of the Army; his stint in the Corps built his confidence, and ended up being "the best thing that ever happened in my life." When the fledging pizza business Monaghan and his brother founded in 1960 was struggling, the brother bailed out: in exchange for their delivery car, Monaghan gained sole control of what would become Domino's. The company scrapped its unprofitable six-inch and nine-inch pies when a bunch of workers called in sick one day; earnings immediately skyrocketed, and a new business model was born. The 1980s were very, very good to Monaghan. Domino's store count surpassed 5000, and the company became the nation's largest privately held restaurant chain. In 1983, Monaghan bought the Detroit Tigers, his hometown baseball team; a year later, the Tigers won the World Series. In 1986, the International Franchise Association named Monaghan its Entrepreneur of the Year. (By 1999, he was number 271 on the Forbes 400 - the annual listing of America's richest individuals - with an estimated net worth of $950 million.) At the height of his success, though, Monaghan had a troubling epiphany. Reading Mere Christianity, by the British Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, he reached a chapter titled "The Great Sin," dedicated to the perils of pride. "That chapter hit me right between the eyes," Monaghan explained at BC High. "I worked harder than most people. I thought that was virtuous. But now I realized that all I was trying to do was have more than other people.... I thought, ?If pride is the greatest sin of all, I've got to be the greatest sinner of all.' " He did not sleep that night. The next morning, Monaghan took what he calls a "millionaire's vow of poverty." He halted construction of a new mansion, sold his extravagant collection of luxury cars, stopped flying first class. And he looked for ways to put his wealth to good use. Monaghan did not sever his ties to Domino's immediately; he retained ownership for nearly a decade, yielding his controlling share in 1998 for almost $1 billion. For much of that time, however, religious philanthropy was his primary focus. In the late 1980s, Monaghan's donations to anti-abortion groups prompted the National Organization for Women to organize a Domino's boycott. In the early 1990s, Monaghan spent millions of dollars rebuilding a Nicaraguan cathedral that had been destroyed in an earthquake. The reconstruction occurred amid widespread poverty and hunger in that country, and was criticized by some as an ostentatious vanity project. For the most part, though, Monaghan has been less interested in strengthening existing institutions than in creating new ones. The parts of his empire are varied (see "Monaghan's Empire," page 18). But they have two things in common: they promulgate Monaghan's highly conservative brand of Catholicism, and they owe their existence to his deep pockets. Building this network has not been cheap. According to Business Week, Monaghan had parted with $450 million of his $950 million fortune by the end of 2004, a giving rate that ranks him ahead of Bill Gates and George Soros. There's an obvious precedent for Monaghan's endeavors. During the Cold War, some East European dissidents challenged the Soviet Union by creating a "parallel polis" - a network of institutions that would let them disengage from Communist society and live in relative freedom. For Monaghan, the enemy is the morally corroded secularism of modern America, and the freedom he seeks is the freedom to fully obey the moral teachings of the Catholic Church. Still, his method is strikingly similar. The resemblance may not end there. Hundreds of years from now, dissenters like Václav Havel will be remembered for helping to foster communism's demise. And Monaghan, as improbable as it may seem today, could be remembered as the man who helped transform America into a theocracy. Talk of the town As Monaghan breathes life into his new Catholic community in Florida, he's enjoying the same good fortune that propelled him to the pinnacle of the business world. He might never have ventured into Collier County if the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, had been more accommodating. But when he proposed building Ave Maria University in Ann Arbor Township, along with a 250-foot-crucifix bearing a 40-foot Jesus, local officials balked, leading Monaghan to look south in 2002. As it turns out, the social and political conservatism of Collier County - in the last presidential election, George W. Bush reaped 65 percent of the vote - fits nicely with Monaghan's own views. (Monaghan is a frequent donor to conservative Republican political figures, including Senators Sam Brownback, Tom Coburn, and Rick Santorum). Naples also has a large Catholic community, as well as large pockets of extreme wealth, much of which is possessed by retirees willing to direct it to the right philanthropic cause. What's more, people are moving there at a brisk clip: Collier County ranks among America's fastest-growing counties, with a population increase of 18 percent between 2000 and 2004. The serendipity doesn't stop there. After giving up on Ann Arbor, Monaghan initially planned to build Ave Maria University at a site in North Naples. But when an eagle - an endangered and protected species - was spotted on the grounds, he was forced to look elsewhere. At this point, the Barron Collier Companies - a powerful local developer named for the same pioneer who gave his name to Collier County - sprang into action, and a deal was struck. Barron Collier would donate 900 acres of land outside Naples to Monaghan so he could build his university; in return, Monaghan and Barron Collier would collaborate on the construction of an adjoining town. For now, the entire community exists only in embryonic form. Ave Maria University, which just graduated its first class, is tucked into a cozy interim campus that blends easily into the sprawling exurb of Greater Naples; the school's buildings were originally constructed for an assisted-living facility. Save for a few telling details - the Vatican flag flapping in the breeze overhead, an unusually high concentration of anti-abortion Florida license plates - it could be just another private community. The 5000-acre site that will eventually house the university and town - a community estimated at 30,000 strong in a decade or so - is just 20 minutes away by car, but feels much farther. The landscape there is dominated by dense orange groves and barren savannah; every few minutes, a battered school bus rattles by, filled with migrant laborers who work the local fields and are returning to their homes in Immokalee, a bleakly poor town a few miles to the north. But the religious heart of Ave Maria - the spiritual DNA of the town and university - is already present in the person of Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, Ave Maria's provost and top-ranking priest. In the last 15 years, Fessio has enjoyed a reversal of fortune so dramatic it almost seems providential. After two clashes with his Jesuit superiors, Fessio had been virtually exiled to a hospital chaplaincy in Southern California. As it turned out, this left him free to take the Ave Maria job - a fortuitous development for Monaghan, since Fessio wrote his dissertation under the guidance of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now known as Pope Benedict XVI. That Fessio and Benedict are close is clear; how close is difficult to say. San Francisco?based Ignatius Press, which Fessio founded and still runs, is the primary English-language publisher of Ratzinger's works. When Ratzinger became pope, Time magazine listed Fessio among the new pontiff's innermost circle. But Fessio - a lanky, intense man whose quarters are located, incongruously, in a cabana next to the school's swimming pool - made light of this when we spoke recently. "I've spent time with him, he's been a great help, we publish his books, I was his student," he said. "But as far as real influence, there's probably hundreds of people who have more." Still, since Benedict was elected, Fessio has become one of the primary interpreters of his nascent papacy, appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, MSNBC's Scarborough Country, and PBS's NewsHour to discuss the new pope and surfacing as a source in countless newspaper stories. When talk turned to the town of Ave Maria, Fessio was more diplomatic. He promised that the Barron Collier Companies will have ultimate authority over the town's character. "No matter what Tom's personal desires might be, or anybody else's, this town is going to be open to everybody," Fessio said. Still, he admitted that a considerable amount of self-selection was likely to occur. Later, when I asked Fessio what Ave Maria's legacy might be a century from now, he was slightly less guarded. "My ideal would be for the entire human race to be fully and completely Catholic, and to serve God that way," Fessio answered. "But that's not going to happen. What do I want for the town? I'd hope the town would be like I'd like the whole planet to be - fully conformed to the truth. But that's not going to happen either. So I don't know. I'll accept whatever happens." Keeping the faith When the first homes in Ave Maria go on the market early in 2007, the students and faculty of Ave Maria University will be among the most likely buyers. So it's possible, by taking stock of the way current members of the Ave Maria University community talk and think, to gauge what the town's atmosphere might be like once it becomes a reality. The promotional materials used to market Ave Maria University exude institutional swagger. The students and faculty are "pioneers" who will "win the hearts and minds of a new generation"; the university is "destined to be a mighty work of the Holy Spirit, a bulwark of Catholic truth against the windstorms of secularism and apostasy which seem to overwhelm our nation and our church." But this cocksureness is oddly lacking on an individual level. As he welcomed me into a study group he was leading on Ratzinger's Spirit of the Liturgy, Fessio urged me to act as a dissenting voice: "Feel free to criticize him," Fessio said, "even though he is the pope." The students' laughter was reassuring - a sign, perhaps, that their faith could comfortably coexist with the outside world. But later, when I asked two recent graduates to discuss their experience at Ave Maria, they turned to Fessio with stricken looks. He quickly explained that all interviews needed to be arranged through the school's PR office. This policy arose again after Latin Mass one morning, when I asked a middle-aged couple what had brought them to Ave Maria. As the wife began answering, the husband quickly stopped her; what I needed to do, he explained anxiously, was talk to the university spokesman. As it turned out, this wasn't just a local Catholic couple in search of a traditional service: the man was William Riordan, a theology professor and Ave Maria's dean of faculty. Vetting questions directed at students is one thing. But it seems odd -and slightly ominous - for a senior faculty member to shy away from freely speaking his mind. Over the course of several days, however, I managed to meet a few candid individuals. The most expansive was Rachel Smolinski, a 26-year-old Floridian who plans to begin graduate study in pastoral studies this fall. As an undergraduate, Smolinski had been an environmental-science major, and she still looked the part - tanned and pretty, in a granola-ish way, with her hair pulled back in a pony tail and small lizards emblazoned on her blue T-shirt. For reasons she couldn't quite explain, though, Smolinski had put her interest in science aside and come to Ave Maria to figure out God's plan for her life. Smolinski told me that the Church is poised on the cusp of a new golden age, a prospect that made her smile beatifically. "There's so much wonderful stuff going on," she marveled, citing the proliferation of the teachings of John Paul II, Mother Teresa, and Benedict XVI. "The beauty of the Church's teachings is coming out and being seen. It's just like the light, and the wonderful goodness ..." She trailed off, then finished her thought. "There's kind of an idea that people sometimes have of the Church as being bad and oppressive and negative and unpleasant. Whereas, really, it's teaching us how to truly be happy, in this world and the next." Smolinski wasn't sure if she would settle in the town of Ave Maria once it was built. She liked the idea of serving as a missionary among unbelievers. Still, she had keen insight into the town's appeal. "The world is so confusing today," Smolinski mused. "It'd be nice to have some places that are solid in faith.... To have that secure community like people used to have, when people respected these beliefs and you weren't being challenged by all these things - wrong attitudes and despair and not understanding what life's about - I think it sounds like a good place." Will Monaghan's vision be realized? The educational piece of the Ave Maria project is developing quickly. This year's graduating class, Ave Maria University's first, had just 23 members - but 150 new students are expected this fall, and total enrollment is approaching 400. And, as Monaghan proudly notes, its name recognition among practicing Catholics is now in the top quartile of Catholic schools. Whether the town of Ave Maria will be everything Monaghan hopes is less clear. Last week, Blake Gable, the Barron Collier Companies' point person for the Ave Maria project, offered an emphatic disclaimer when I mentioned Monaghan's plans for the community. "It's an ongoing debate between our company and Tom how Catholic the town is going to be," Gable said. "He feels, obviously, that it's going to be extremely Catholic. We feel it's going to be, certainly at the beginning, primarily Catholic. But we are not going to discriminate or market to Catholics - that's simply not what the company believes in. Tom has his vision, and we have ours." Monaghan's vision, though, is the one that's currently being marketed to prospective residents in the Angelus, the newspaper of Ave Maria University, which mentions the same restrictions Monaghan cited at BC High and describes the town as a "utopia." And it's this vision that Collier County's board of commissioners has embraced. According to Jim Coletta - the commissioner from the county's Fifth District, where the new university and town will be built - the project's anticipated economic benefits are one reason for the board's unanimous support. "The idea of Ave Maria coming to the Immokalee area - it was one of those things. You know, like God gives you a gift every once in a while," said Coletta, a genial man who keeps an alligator head, two mounted fish, and a George W. Bush action figure in his office. Another big reason, Coletta told me, was Monaghan's moral rigor. "This commission has been very supportive of Ave Maria and the principles that it stands for," he explained. "Ave Maria is going to be a unique town, set up on its own. They have the ability to control things within their own border." That's the idea, anyway. But according to Barry Lynn, the executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the tight control to which Monaghan aspires may be legally untenable. "I think they really can't do this, as much as they might want to," Lynn says. "You can't create your own town and then decide what all of the rules will be for living in that town. You can't have a religious test for purchasing a house.... This kind of approach to creating your own little community is still governed by fundamental civil-rights and civil-liberties principles that are inherent in the constitution of the state of Florida and the federal Constitution. This is not a guy who's buying his own island out in the Pacific. If he did that, he might be able to get away with all of this." The legal issues are hardly clear-cut, however. At the outset, the town of Ave Maria will be unincorporated, with several key municipal services (utilities, trash pickup) managed by the developers rather than by Collier County. The private K-12 school slated for construction will likely serve the majority of Ave Maria's younger students. In addition, the land in question is privately owned instead of publicly held, and Collier County usually gives private developers wide latitude to control real-estate usage. In other words, the county's major contribution to the project may be just allowing it to proceed - and it's not clear what principles governing church-state separation this violates, if any. What's more, recent legal precedent may be on Monaghan's side. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to a federal appeals-court ruling that allowed Orthodox Jews in Tenafly, New Jersey, to create an eruv - a demarcated area within which specific religious prohibitions would be followed on holy days and the Sabbath - inside that community. It was an emphatic validation of the constitutional right to freedom of association. The parallel with Ave Maria isn't perfect, since the Tenafly case involved occasional behavior within a pre-existing community. But it bodes well for those who envision a more restrictive Ave Maria. So, it's worth noting, do Monaghan's ties with Antonin Scalia, the conservative Catholic Supreme Court justice who was recently a "justice-in-residence" at Ave Maria Law School, and Clarence Thomas, Scalia's Supreme Court colleague, who spoke at the law school in 1999 and 2004. Even so, a number of troubling scenarios come to mind. What happens, for example, if an outspoken atheist tries to purchase a home in Ave Maria? If supporters of a political candidate who backs abortion rights attempt to canvass there, will they be turned away? If an individual or group of persons living inside Ave Maria deviate from Monaghan's conception of Catholic orthodoxy - say, by possessing pornography or contraception - what will the consequences be? Strange as it may sound, the best outcome for Monaghan and his supporters might be to see Ave Maria challenged in the courts. It is a commonplace, among conservative Christians of all stripes, that the judiciary and the broader culture are hostile to "people of faith." The acuteness of this conviction should not be underestimated. In 2000, for example, Father John McCloskey, another eminent Catholic conservative, wrote a widely noted letter framed as a communication, in 2030, from an elderly priest to a newly ordained youth. In McCloskey's imagination, a vague but ominous conflict had replaced the United States with a "Regional States of North America"; the Catholic Church in the US had emerged stronger, but hardly unscathed. "As it turns out," the imaginary mentor tells his protégé, "those few years in prison and the torture were wonderful for my spiritual life." If meddling secularists and activist judges intrude on Monaghan's project, the collective ire of orthodox Catholics - who are already incensed by America's embrace of the so-called culture of death - will only intensify. And those who share Monaghan's worldview will have a new martyr. If the town of Ave Maria proceeds apace, meanwhile, the militantly separatist Catholic subculture that's already growing in American society will be that much stronger. Either way, Tom Monaghan wins.
Tom Monaghan's coming Catholic utopia 
It takes courage - or recklessness, or contempt - to stand inside Boston College High School and condemn the state of Catholic education. For nearly 150 years, BC High has been a prized destination for the sons of local Catholic families; the list of notable alumni includes politicians (former state Senate president William Bulger) and intellectuals (former New York Times Book Review editor Chip McGrath), and being a "Triple Eagle" - a graduate of BC High, Boston College, and Boston College Law School - is still a potent credential in Boston's corridors of power. 
This puts Fessio in a remarkably prominent position in American Catholicism, and will surely help Monaghan as he markets Ave Maria in the coming years. But liberal American Catholics will likely find Fessio's rise discouraging. Last month, I asked Fessio if American Catholics are obligated to embrace a specific political identity. "I can't give you a yes-or-no answer to that," he replied - and then, for all intents and purposes, he did exactly that. "I think it's more difficult for someone who's trying to live his life consistently with the Catholic faith to vote for Democratic candidates, because the party's platform includes things which are clearly against Catholic teaching, such as abortion and homosexual marriage and so on," Fessio said. True, he continued, Democrats support the welfare state and Republicans do not - but despite the Church's doctrine of a "preferential option for the poor," Fessio refused to call this a Democratic strength. "These are things which the Catholic Church can accept different points of view on," he claimed, somewhat mysteriously. Later, Fessio insisted that any Catholic politician who supports legalized abortion should be denied communion. "This is a very simple question, a question of integrity and consistency and identity," he argued. "Look - if you are sincerely convinced, that's fine. I won't vote for you. But please don't call yourself a Catholic in good standing. And don't behave in such a way that would give the impression that you are."
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#1. To: Mr Nuke Buzzcut (#0)
Combine a billion dollars with Jim Jones, and this is what you get. Taken with the rise of Protestant Dominionism and the religious right, this may indeed be a harbinger of things to come. As Gibbon put it, the triumph of superstition and barbarism.
they turned to Fessio with stricken looks. He quickly explained that all interviews needed to be arranged through the school's PR office.
I've seen their ways too often for my liking.
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