Ave Maria University: A Catholic project gone wrong

From The Miami New Times here.

Marielena Stuart stood in the middle of a quietstreet, 120 miles across the swamp from Miami, and stared down the blackplastic barrel of a news camera. Behind her loomed a monstrous church, its100-foot orange-brick façade shimmering like scales in the nighttimespotlights. Stuart glanced up at its one round window — a Cyclops's unblinkingeye gazing out over the strange, tiny town of Ave Maria — and shuddered. . . .

Stuart's two years in Ave Maria had become a nightmare, she added, allbecause she had committed the cardinal sin of questioning town founder and Domino's Pizza magnate TomMonaghan. On her blog, the Chronicles of Ave Maria, Stuart had compared theplace to a prison and Monaghan to its warden. She and her family had been"harassed" because she was the only one willing to stand up to thebillionaire and his edicts.

"I believe that the duty of a journalist is to expose and write thetruth," Stuart said. "And I've written the truth."

That was in 2009. Two years earlier, Monaghan had unveiled Ave Maria as hisvision for a new and righteous America founded upon strict Catholic values. Hehad sunk a half-billion dollars into building the town and its centerpieceuniversity in the middle of the Corkscrew Swamp, 20 miles northeast of Naples.Calling the place a ticket to Heaven, he had boasted that birth control andpornography wouldn't be allowed. Ave Maria would be the epicenter of anAmerican Catholic revival: "a saint factory" that would "changethe world," he promised.

But there has been trouble in paradise.Construction has halted, leaving half-built subdivisions to mildew in thetropical heat. Lawsuits and a federal investigation have dogged Monaghan. Ave Maria University's ambitious athleticprogram fell to pieces amid an unholy trinity of F-bombs, firings, anddefections. And the town's hidden, anti-democratic, and perhaps unconstitutionalorigins have been splashed across local news. Instead of a city on a hill, AveMaria has become a place of secrets and sectarianism. . . .

Rice adds that, before leaving the law school, he warned Monaghan that his idea for a strictly Catholic town to host the university was impossible. "Tom had this concept of a place with no pornography, no contraceptives," he says. "I told him right up front that there is no way he could do that. It would be unconstitutional."

Monaghan didn't listen. . . .

"This is a very unique arrangement here. It's almost like what you would see in medieval times when a baron would go and build himself a church and monastery." . . .

"It's a vicious town," Stuart says. "Once in, there is no way out."

("Street View" from Google Earth) [Click on image to enlarge it]