In “The Deliverer”, Peter J. Boyer writes about Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza, who decided “to use his wealth (‘God’s money,’ he said) to somehow rescue the Catholic Church from what he saw as its slide toward apostasy.” Boyer writes, “Monaghan set out on a course that brought him into the upper circles of the conservative Catholic movement, allied him with anti-Sandinista churchmen in Nicaragua, led to the founding of a law school, and drew Domino’s into the fight over abortion in America.” Now Monaghan is building a new town in Florida (he intends for it to “reflect traditional Catholic values”) that will be home to a new university, one that, Boyer writes, will be “more Catholic than the University of Notre Dame.”
http://www.newyorker.com/pressThe town and the university, both called Ave Maria, became the subject of controversy last year, when Monaghan said in a speech that no pornography or contraceptives would be sold there. Paul Marinelli, the president of the Barron Collier Company, which is developing the town, tells Boyer, “We are not restricting the contraceptives,” but also, “in deference to Tom’s request, and to the Catholic university, we’re requesting that contraceptives not be sold.” Monaghan tells Boyer, “I’m not going to break the law. We want to be a family town. But if there’s an openly gay couple living next door to some family, and those kids would have to be subjected to that, I don’t know. In the first place, I don’t know how many gay couples are going to want to come live in the town. And if we can’t prevent it, well, we’ll tolerate it.” Ave Maria has also divided Catholic conservatives—Monaghan’s own base—partly because of his plan to move the college and law the school he helped found in Michigan (both also called Ave Maria) to the new town in Florida, and partly because of the amount of control he insists on having. One law-school professor tells Boyer, “The board and Tom would like to make us irrelevant.... They would like to treat us as pieces of pizza.”
Boyer, who talked to Monaghan in a series of interviews in both Michigan and Florida, describes how, when Monaghan was six, his mother dropped him off at a Catholic orphanage, where he spent most of his childhood. “I was taught—and I bought it—that if I live a certain way I’m going to go to Heaven, and if I live a certain way I was going to go to Hell,” Monaghan says. “So, to me, it’s all that simple. I get it, and I want other people to get it, too, for their own benefit. Is that illogical? Is that insanity? I don’t know. I don’t want to go to Hell.”
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