The great TOM MONAGHAN
Ave Maria founder's dirigible of faith
BY ROGER WILLIAMS rwilliams@florida-weekly.com

Tom Monaghan and a rendering of Ave Maria.

Joe Marinelli adjusts his headset to position the little microphone in front of his lips. He checks his mirrors, then eases his open-windowed trolley gently around the long row of shiny automobiles parked in front of five model homes, all of them bathed in the hopeful light of an April morning.

He drives past the white tent where sales reps stand idly chatting with each other, mentions that the brick-and-mortar Pulte Homes sales center will be open this week after several months of make-do in the tent, and pulls through an alertly guarded security gate.

Now Marinelli is on Ave Maria Boulevard. About 800 yards away, seeming to float upward from the manicured flatland like a straining dirigible of faith, is a cathedral - the stunning Ave Maria Oratory. The thing is so incongruous out here among the tomato fields and orange groves of eastern Collier County that it's impossible not to stare, and that's what every passenger on the trolley does, all of them startled into momentary silence.

Perhaps peasants once experienced a similar silence when they first came in view of the great medieval cathedrals of Western Europe, stretching toward heaven. And perhaps they murmured (silently) the very words that have given rise to the magnificent structure five miles south of Immokalee: Ad Majorem Dei Gloria - For the greater glory of God.

Marinelli breaks the reverential silence. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announces, "what you'll witness today is the great Tom Monaghan."

Certainly any witness would acknowledge that Monaghan has changed. Once defined as a pizza king, he is now 101 feet tall and topped by a 15-foot golden cross that beckons witnesses to join "the one true faith."

A humble zealot struggles

With 11,000 homes planned on Ave Maria's 5,000 acres, this is arguably the largest construction project in the United States. And Monaghan's endeavor - to secure the faithful and convert the rest by means of the priests, nuns, teachers, academicians and lawyers to be educated here - is arguably the most difficult task.

Although his Latin motto for the university is European to the core, Monaghan is an American success story - pragmatic, determined, idiosyncratic and personally devout, many acknowledge.

SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY From left to right, Nick Healy, president of Ave Maria University. Ms. Dian Mayo, donor of the Celtic Cross for the AMU Oratory, T. Monaghan - at the Topping Off ceremony for the Oratory in October.

"I know of few Catholics, secular or religious, who will undergo hardship to make daily Mass," says Nicholas Healy, the university's president, who met Monaghan in 1983. "If he has to stay up until midnight or get up at 4 a.m. to attend Mass, he will. And because of promises he's made, I think he's now up to five times a day saying the rosary."

Which means Monaghan has to stop what he's doing, kneel and pray.

"He's a bit eccentric, but he's more humble in person and quiet than you might imagine," says Joan LaGuardia, a former newspaper religion reporter who spent a lot of time observing him. "He's not large in stature, maybe 5'8, and he always wears navy blue suits and a red tie with no jewelry, so he's not imposing. He may once have been considered a bully in the boardroom, but I think he's given that up.

"I've often heard people say they think he has a lot of hubris because he dares to want to take people to heaven. But I don't see evidence of hubris. I see faith. I think people today don't value faith. They think faith is like an emotional weakness, almost as if it's akin to a mental instability."

Recent deep dings have caused instability in the body of his reputation, brought on by heavily reported and controversial comments or conflicts at Ave Maria. But they have not altered the fact that Monaghan's university is about to open its doors for roughly 500 students in late summer.

Furniture will be moved into some of the academic buildings on campus the last week of July, says Healy - the same week as the first residents are expected to move into the surrounding town.

Meanwhile, Monaghan works and prays. Although he purchased a $3.5 million beachfront house in Naples, that was mostly so his wife, Marjorie, would want to come here, says Healy. Left alone, he prefers to stay in a dormitory room on campus.

And nowadays he refuses to grant interviews following a tough year in the press. No administrators or faculty members may speak to the press about the university or about Monaghan, either, without the express permission of Monaghan's public relations agency, Robert Falls & Co., in Cleveland, they say. Much of this has to do with what's happened recently.

The billion-dollar Catholic

First, Monaghan irritated faculty and students at the law school he founded in Michigan by telling them they'd have to close up shop and move to Florida this year or do without his money. Then he announced that birth control devices and pornographic cable television would not be part of Ave Maria Town, and that homosexuals would not be welcome - irritating various groups, including the ACLU.

Most recently, he moved a well-respected priest and scholar - Father Joseph Fessio - out of his job as university provost and then, after a storm of public protest, back into a job as a teacher a day later.

"He can admit mistakes, he knows he errs and has sin, he's the first to recognize it," explains Healy. "And he can change directions, which is something a proud man can't. If you can't admit mistakes you grow too cautious in order to avoid them, or pride won't let you act with imagination."

But in the case of Father Fessio's dismissal from a seat at the helm of this ship of faith, no mistake was made, says Healy. And little explanation is given.

"You have to look very closely at what (Father Fessio) was moved out of and what he was moved into," says Healy. "There was no question in Tom's mind that he should be out of administration, but no question also that he is a beloved priest, both by students and donors. So this is not an example of Tom making an error."

Much of Monaghan's story is by now well known. A native Michigander, he created and sold Domino's Pizza for a reported $1 billion dollars. He once owned the World Champion Detroit Tigers (winners, under Monaghan, of the 1984 World Series), and he served for three years in his youth as a United States Marine (in the mid-1950s). He's bought and sold expensive jets, helicopters and cars, once famously paying $6.1 million for an ultrarare Bugatti Royale auto, and once purchasing a dining room suite designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for $1.6 million. Then he began to give it all up almost a decade ago, after reading C.S. Lewis's, "Mere Christianity," he has said.

Battle between good and evil

His early life sometimes made Horatio Alger's look easy, or at least ordinary: Monaghan's father died on Christmas Eve, 1941, when the boy was five. The next year, his mother placed him and his younger brother in a Catholic orphanage and later in foster homes. Monaghan now says it was Sister Mary Berarda in the St. Joseph's Home for Boys (Jackson, Michigan), who taught him how to be a good Catholic.

His wife of 45 years, Marjorie Monaghan, with whom he has four adult daughters, remains a Lutheran, according to a February profile in "The New Yorker" that details many of these facts.

Monaghan, meanwhile, has become not merely devout but extraordinary in his Catholic zeal.

He founded a school in Honduras, and built a church over one destroyed by an earthquake in Nicaragua (he became intimately familiar with the often-violent politics of that region at the time, but denies involvement). He founded a millionaire's club for orthodox Catholics to use their money to advance the faith, and a dating service for Catholics, among other organizations.

And he has announced variously that his great wealth is "God's money," and he wishes only to provide for his family and to die with nothing.

That might not prove too difficult at costly Ave Maria. The magnificent stone of his great façade is nearly complete now. Its masons - imported Rhode Islanders, Marinelli announces - work from scaffolding about 90 feet above the earth, around a gaping whole where a rose window will soon be installed. "You can attend Mass on Christmas Eve in the Oratory," a magnified voice intones - Marinelli again.

A circle of three- or four-story buildings with Italianate balconies and arched windows surrounds the church on the north, south and east, forming the commercial heart of the town and facing its spiritual heart across a spacious plaza.

Nearly complete, the buildings appear to be unfinished supplicants awaiting only the breath of life - a Catholic village life envisioned by Monaghan for contemporary Americans in harness to an orthodox faith.

"I view history as a giant battle between good and evil, and I don't want to be on the sidelines," he has said, wedding an American sports metaphor to a Roman theological first principle.

There's no chance, now, of his remaining on the sidelines. The trolley gapers love what they see, several exclaiming in pleasure, including a foursome speaking English with heavy Italian accents.

On the surface, all this may seem a contradiction: an American, after all, is a pluralist and a democrat, and an orthodox Catholic isn't, at least theoretically. Unlike many Americans, an orthodox Catholic will not take worldly wealth as a goal or a virtue, and yet Monaghan has been one of the wealthiest humans on the planet. His partner in the huge project, Barron Collier Companies - a developer that donated 1,000 of these acres for Monaghan's university and controls the rest - is clearly interested in acquiring greater wealth. So is Pulte Homes, which will ultimately build roughly 8,000 of the 11,000 homes planned here for about 35,000 residents.

But Father Fessio - who studied with the Pope, founded Ignatius Press and comes equipped with a formidable reputation - helps to explain Monaghan by talking about other driven, ambitious American Catholic men. But not before noting what the rules of conversation are.

"In the spirit of truth, and in the spirit of Ave Maria to tell the truth, I should tell you that I cannot speak to the media about Ave Maria - none of us can, not unless Robert Falls says we can," he says, speaking by cell phone from California.

Minutes later in Cleveland, Robert Falls says, "Fessio is off the table" - not available as a voice who can discuss Ave Maria or Tom Monaghan.

But Fessio can discuss American Catholicism - or the lack of it.

"Look," Fessio explains, "God exists, Jesus is his son, He founded a church, and the Church is authorized in His name. You can be poor, rich, white or black, American, African - it doesn't matter, if you believe that.

"In that context, you get American politicians and people like John F. Kennedy, who were raised in the Church but did not accept all the teachings of the Church - like Teddy Kennedy today, or Rudolph Giuliani, or Mario Cuomo, or John Kerry. They say, 'Oh yes, I'm a Catholic, but I support the right of a woman to choose or have an abortion.' And the answer is, you can have the freedom to promote that, you can support it and talk about it, but you can't call yourself a Catholic.

"Tom Monaghan is a Catholic."

And if Monaghan the Catholic is praying for souls these days, his confederate developers at Ave Maria are praying for the resurrection of a hot housing market, they say. All of which will prove astoundingly fortunate for Collier County itself, especially since Monaghan, who turned 70 last month, has sunk $220 million of his own money into the endeavor, which is running somewhere in the vicinity of $400 million for phase one.

"This is a good catalyst for things in eastern Collier, which we're interested in, and I think it's going great, considering the real estate market," says Blake Gable, vice president of real estate and project manager of Ave Maria, for Barron Collier. "We have over 200 sales, so far."

That's not a lot, considering the ultimate goal. On the other hand, about 75 percent of the commercial space had been leased as of last week, says a Pulte salesman, Barry Eisenberg.

Home prices now are ranging from just over $200,000 to almost $500,000, and condominiums (perhaps they should be called condominia in deference to the Latin usage) are for sale in the commercial buildings surrounding the plaza and Oratory. Ultimately, too, there will be "affordable housing" in the town, so that Catholics of limited means (or anybody else, Monaghan has said) can live here, too.

Redefining the good life

Marinelli, continuing his tour, points out that 45 percent of the land will be green space, 40 miles of trails will invite presumably contemplative strolls, there will be tennis courts, ball fields, a Catholic school for students ranging from kindergarten to the 12th grade, a public school to come years from now, police and fire services, a supermarket as yet unnamed, an 18-hole Del Webb golf course and 9 supplemental holes for golfers, and very low golf membership fees. In short, Tom Monaghan has redefined the American Catholic good life.

"I think this is a man who excelled in business, became wealthy, and became bored with the limits of what he could achieve in the material world," suggests Joan LaGuardia. "And where do people of great ambition go when their earthly ambition bores them? People think of these kinds of men or women as zealots or extremists, but I think they're just a step ahead.

"He reminds me of those Buddhist monks who spend all that time making those sand sculptures and then open the doors and let the wind take it. You ask, 'Are they nuts?' But he's doing something the wind isn't going to take away." ¦