Conservative Businessman to Create New Community

Aug. 7, 2007 — -- A one-time wilderness in Florida is being transformed into the Promised Land. A buccaneering businessman with strong Catholic values wants to build a new community from scratch.

Tom Monaghan, founder of the worldwide Domino's Pizza chain, is sinking his billion-dollar fortune into a new town called Ave Maria, a joint venture with a local developer. It will number 11,000 new homes and, unsurprisingly for a man who opposes abortion, contraception and homosexuality, at the summit of this planned community is not a golf course but a church.

"It'll seat about 1,100 people, including the choir loft," Monaghan said of the church, "and there'll be seating for about 25 priests that can celebrate a mass."

Across the road from the church is Monaghan's other singular contribution to the development, a new Catholic university that will house over 5,000 students.

"We need a new kind of Catholic school with an emphasis on combining excellence in spiritual aspect and also excellence in education," he said.

So what prompted this 70-year-old entrepreneur to pursue his dream of building a kind of Catholic heaven on 5,000 acres of earth?

It may be because Tom Monaghan has been searching for a community like Ave Maria for most of his life. He was born in March 1937 into a poor family of unskilled workers -- his mother a domestic servant, his father (and hero) a truck driver.

"I was so poor, and I was always conscious of what other kids had," he said. "I had to scrape the manure off my shoes when I went to school and I had to keep my feet on the floor so you couldn't see the soles of my shoes."

By 10th grade, Monaghan had decided to join the priesthood and was accepted into seminary, but he lasted less than a year.

"[The] rector said I didn't have a vocation… so he said, 'Tom, when you're packing your bags for Easter, pack them for good.' And I cried," Monaghan recalled. "I was crushed 'cause I thought I was more interested in being a priest than almost every kid in that seminary."