The question is still, who the hell would want to live in such a place.
---
Bill Berkowitz
March 31, 2007
Troubled Times at Tom Monaghan's Ave Maria U
Tom Monaghan's Ave Maria University, located in the friendly confines of
the still-under-construction Ave Maria Town in Florida has been the
subject of unwanted headlines during the past few weeks. Within the
space of 48 hours, one of the university's top administrators, Provost
Joseph Fessio, was fired and then rehired.
Details of the original firing are still murky. At first it appeared
that Fessio, founder of Ignatius Press in San Francisco (the primary
English-language publisher of Pope Benedict XVI) and the University of
San Francisco's Ignatius Institute, wasn't up to the task of enrolling
enough students or raising the necessary money for building the first
new Catholic university in the U.S. in 40 years. Then, it seemed that
the former student and longtime friend of the current Pope (formerly
Cardinal Josef Ratzinger) may have been let go because of his comments
to the California Catholic Daily suggesting that homosexuality has
biological roots.
Fessio told the publication that "same-sex activity is considered
disordered. If there are ways of detecting diseases or disorders of
children in the womb, and a way of treating them that respected the
dignity of the child and mother, it would be a wonderful advancement of
science." Is it unclear, however, which part of these comments would
upset Monaghan.
This we do know: On March 21, Fessio sent a brief email to member of the
Ave Maria community which read: "To the Ave Maria Community: I have been
asked to resign my position as provost and leave the campus immediately.
I will miss Ave Maria and the many of you whom I hold dear."
The California Catholic Daily reported that a university-issued
statement said Fessio "was asked to step down ... as a result of
irreconcilable differences over administrative policies and practices."
His resignation, said the statement, does not signify "any difference in
our commitment to our mission or to the Magisterium of the Church" or
"to maintaining the highest quality of scholarship." The university
thanked Fessio for his contributions "to the liturgical and intellectual
development of the institution." And, said, the statement, "we look
forward to him serving the University in an advisory capacity in the
future."
The future evidently manifested itself in a hurry: A day after he was
fired, Fessio was rehired as a "designated theologian in residence,"
with teaching duties, a room on campus, and making plans for student
study abroad. Although the university did not say why it reinstated
Fessio, it did say that it was "as a sign of our esteem for his great
gifts and abilities." In reality, it may have been student protests that
caused the university to rethink its position.
Monaghan's mission
Ave Maria University -- the focal point of a new city also called Ave
Maria ("Hail Mary" in Latin) located 20 miles northeast of Naples,
Florida -- is the brainchild of Tom Monaghan, the Domino's Pizza founder
who over the years has become a major contributor to far-right Catholic
causes.
The News-Sentinel of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, recently noted that
"Promotional materials [for the town] promise roomy homes, which range
from about $170,000 to the high $600,000s, by builders Pulte, DiVosta
and Del Webb; a commercial center with offices, shops, a Mexican
restaurant, coffee shop, pub and ice-cream parlor; schools, parks, a
golf course, fitness center and water park."
Monaghan wasn't always concerned about monastic things. As Peter J.
Boyer pointed out in a profile in The New Yorker (February 19 & 26,
2007), "In the nineteen-eighties, as Monaghan attained a place on lists
of the wealthiest Americans, he went on a wish-fulfillment spree. He
wanted to fly, so he bought a Gulfstream jet and a Sikorsky S-76
helicopter. He was a college dropout who had longed to study
architecture; instead he became the world's leading collector of the
decorative works of his hero, Frank Lloyd Wright. ... In his teens,
Monaghan had been a penniless car buff; now he acquired a fleet of
automobiles, including a handmade Bugatti Royale, and the Packard that
conveyed F.D.R. to his second inauguration. ... [And, at age 46] in the
autumn of 1983, he bought the Detroit Tigers baseball team."
All this accumulation of goodies happened before Monaghan's now
much-publicized religious awakening, when he decided to use, as he put
it, "Gods money," to save the Catholic Church from itself.
After Monaghan bought the Tigers in 1983, he set up a foundation that
was generally aimed at supporting the Catholic Church. In discussions
with "a fellow-parishioner, the Catholic writer Ralph Martin," Monaghan
began to understand the problems within the church. "He explained it to
me," Monaghan told Boyer. Martin, Boyer noted, is the author of the
"influential" 1982 book called "Crisis of Truth," "in which he warned
that clergymen and theologians within the Church were working against
the true faith, and that the Church's embrace of trendy ideologies was
corrupting an unsuspecting flock."
According to Boyer, Martin's beef with the Church grew out of the
"liberalizing reforms of the second Vatican Council, convened in 1962,
had mutated into an assault on Church teaching and scriptural
authority." The essence of the split therefore was between those that
were "oriented to a judgmental God and the promise of redemption, [and
those that saw] God's will at work in the pursuit of social justice,"
Boyer wrote.
"I just told him [Monaghan], 'Hey, there's a lot of different stuff
going on in the Church these days,'" Martin told Boyer. "And some of it
really is in harmony with two thousand years of Catholic tradition, and
some of it isn't."
Monaghan became a major protagonist in the struggle against what Boyer
called "the zenith of liberation theology"; the Reagan Administration's
struggle against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. According to Boyer, "The
struggle became a kind of proxy war between Catholic liberals and
Catholic conservatives outside Nicaragua."
Ralph Martin was deeply opposed to liberation theology; "he had built a
network in Central America, and one of its members, Father Enrique
Silvestre, persuaded Monaghan to visit his mission in a squalid Honduras
village called El Mochito." The Honduras visit set Monaghan in motion:
his first philanthropic efforts including buying bought Silvestre a
pickup truck and a generator for the hydroelectric plant and started a
sewing factory.
More importantly, Monaghan found his cause in the Nicaraguan Contras.
Although, according to Boyer, Monaghan claimed he "provided no direct,
material support for their effort," he acknowledged that he thought the
Church was being "persecuted" by the Sandinistas.
Beginning in the late 1980s, Monaghan "was moving in elite orthodox
Catholic circles," hanging with such notable intellectuals as George
Weigel and Michael Novak, "who were far more grounded than he was in the
Catholic intellectual tradition," Boyer pointed out.
He was profoundly influenced by an essay by C.S. Lewis -- the only
Protestant writer included in Dinesh D'Souza's book "The Catholic
Classics" -- which posited that pride was "the essential vice, the
utmost evil. .... It was through Pride that the devil became the devil.
Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of
mind."
"That hit me right between the eyes," Monaghan told Boyer. The day after
reading Lewis, he "began to dispossess himself of the earthly treasures
he'd accumulated."
In 1998, he sold Dominos for a billion dollars and went on a
philanthropic tear: he renamed his foundation and gave it $250 million;
he founded Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan, opened the Ave
Maria School of Law in the fall of 2000 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
(Monaghan's plans for moving the law school from Michigan to the new
campus on the edge of Florida's Corkscrew Swamp by 2009, has angered a
number of the law school's student and teachers, the blog Gay Religion
reported on March 27.)
A few years later, he set about laying the plans for his orthodox
Catholic town.
Controversial from the beginning
Controversy has surrounded the building of the town from the point when
Monaghan first proclaimed, in a speech to a Catholic men's group, that
"We're going to control the cable television that comes in the area.
There is not going to be any pornographic television in Ave Maria Town.
If you go to the drugstore and you want to buy the pill or the condoms
or contraception, you won't be able to get that."
Since that time, The News-Sentinel reported in late March, "Monaghan
softened his initial commandments for the Collier County town, backing
away from claims that it would ban birth control, pornography and
abortion."
"The university is Catholic; the community is going to be everybody,''
said Blake Gable, vice president of real estate for Barron Collier and
project manager for Ave Maria. "The cable, Comcast, is the exact same as
everywhere. The commercial lease is the same as everywhere.''
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida and other groups have
criticized Monaghan for "what they say is his attempt to impose his
conservative religious ideology on residents," The News-Sentinel
reported. "This is not a debate about whether people who are of similar
religious or ethnic or racial background have a right to live in the
same community,'' said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of
Florida. "The issue is: Will the laws of the community be reflective of
religious dogma and thereby end up restricting the rights of people who
are religious minorities in the community?''
And the town has come under fire from environmentalists as well.
"Defenders of Wildlife objected to the town's location, which the
organization says encroaches on the habitat of the endangered Florida
panther," The News-Sentinel reported. "Last month, the group threatened
to file a federal lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers for
approving the project."
In a post titled "Jeb Bush, FPL Glades Power Plant, Ave Maria
University, and Scripps by gimleteye" (March 27), Eye on Miami pointed
to a recent Miami Herald story that told of how "Government agencies
were marshaled to avoid consideration of important environmental
impacts, like the fact that Ave Maria University is squarely in the
midst of habitat for the Florida panther."
"The Herald report features prospective buyers touring the construction
site in trolley cars, the same way they did in 1920 in Coral Gables.
Buyers lured with flags and demonstration units and incentives,
surrounded by functional wetlands turned into stormwater ditches."
On Monday, March 26, at the Annunciation Mass, The Rev. Robert Garrity,
the university chaplain, tried to put the best possible spin on the
turbulent events of the past week. Garrity asked about 450 people who
gathered under a billowing white tent "to forgive and put the
difficulties in perspective," according to a report posted at
BonitaNews.com.
"Have there been some traumatic events in the history of Ave Maria
University?" Garrity asked as he celebrated the Mass which marks the day
the Angel Gabriel visited Mary to tell her she would become the mother
of Jesus. "Yes, there will always be difficulties and bumps in the road
and traumatic events."
Garrity reminded the students, staff and faculty in attendance that "We
are almost in the Promised Land. You can see it right over here," he
said, pointing to a spot a short distance away where work is being done
to finish up university buildings and condos in time for the official
August opening.
---
http://www.mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=185
--
John #1782
"We should always be disposed to believe that which appears to us to be
white is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides."
- Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) Founder of the Jesuit Order.
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