Tom Monaghan, Pizza Theocrat
A good answer to "why shouldn't Catholics be Billionaires?"
I have shared this fun fact many times when trying to explain to people why I am the way that I am: when I was an undergrad at a Catholic university, my school held a Theology on Tap on the subject “Can Catholics Drive Bentleys?”, to which the answer was yes. I still think about it a lot; in my now-home of Chicago, a city struggling with tremendous inequality in wealth and power, the Catholic cathedral happens to be in a very nice part of town, and there’s a Bentley dealership one block over, which seems really dissonant to me. And I think the more I learn about Catholicism, and definitely the more I learn about rich people, the harder it is for me to accept that you can be a person who lives an authentically Catholic life and also amasses more wealth than you could ever possibly spend, or even be adjacent to that kind of wealth.
But there was one man from Michigan who stepped forward and said "Oh yeah? Why can't I do both?" and then proceeded to answer his own question in the most bizarre and hilarious way possible. He made billions, proudly and publicly made his Catholic faith a centerpiece of his life, used his billions to try to remake the church in his own image, made every possible stupid mistake while doing that, and shot himself in the dick continuously for a full decade. That's a tidy summary of the very messy story of Tom Monaghan, the man who founded both Ave Maria University and Domino's Pizza.
CHAPTER ONE - HIS BUSTER BLUTH ASS
"One day in high school religion class, Sr. Andrea asked, 'How do you get to heaven?' The hands of all the smart girls in class hands [sic] went up right away as they answered with responses like - lead a good life, love God, and practice the virtues of faith, hope, and love but they were all wrong. Tom said he couldn't believe it, he knew the answer. 'How do you get there?'. He answered, 'Die in the state of sanctifying grace'."
You need to do a lot of research to really get a handle on Tom Monaghan’s early life, because just reading the Wikipedia page leaves you with far more questions than answers. Take this passage: Monaghan spent part of his childhood in a Catholic orphanage and, as it turns out:
“One of the nuns there inspired his devotion to the Catholic faith and he later entered St. Joseph's Seminary, in Grand Rapids, with the desire to eventually become a priest. Subsequently, he was expelled from the seminary for a series of disciplinary infractions. In 1956, Monaghan enlisted in the United States Marine Corps by mistake; he had meant to join the Army. He received anhonorable discharge in 1959.”
Perhaps you have some questions as well, like “what kind of disciplinary infractions get you kicked out of seminary when you consider who they let get through seminary?” and “how far did he get into basic training before he realized he had joined the wrong branch of the armed services?” Perhaps you’re imagining his Buster Bluth ass going "you know, we're doing a lot of boat stuff for Army people". The actual story on the military thing is that Monaghan wanted to join the Army, but just went to the nearest military recruiting station, signed the paperwork, and then they said "you know this is the Marines, right?" and apparently - I'm reading between the lines here so bear with me - there are no takesies-backsies on this sort of thing. Also, weirdly, for a time he was in the same Marine unit with Lee Harvey Oswald, so it’s also fun to imagine Monaghan, a little bit later in life, getting fed up with JFK’s womanizing and ordering a hit on him.
As to the first question about the seminary, it appears that his disciplinary infractions, as Monaghan himself has said in interviews, were "starting pillow fights and whispering during periods of silence." Which, of course, probably leads you to some more questions. He also, by his own admission, may never have really made it through seminary, saying in a 2007 interview that "I wanted to be a priest from the time I was in the second grade. Then I sat behind this girl in the seventh grade, and I completely forgot about it." He said in a separate interview on the same question “'I'm not one of those people who likes to study. If I'm not interested, I can't stay awake for more than a couple of pages.” As you will soon see, Monaghan admitting that he's too lazy and horny for seminary is going to end up being the single most relatable thing about him.
The nuns that Monaghan met in that Catholic orphanage where he spent part of his childhood were his first models of living the faith that he still carries with him today. In a 2007 New Yorker profile titled “The Deliverer” - nicely done - he describes his understanding of Catholicism, and the description ended up capturing everything he knows about Catholicism pretty exhaustively:
"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. And that’s for eternity. And Hell was worse than anything you can imagine here. Heaven was better than anything you can imagine. 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.”
People become religious for all sorts of reasons, and I don't really begrudge anybody any of them. Some people convert later in life because they meet someone or get connected through their community. Some people are born into it and they grow up into it and they stay there, either through inertia or through learning more about the faith they grew up in and discovering something that really resonates with them. There’s me, I’m basically a Catholic purely out of spite at this point. And then there’s Tom Monaghan, who literally says “I don’t know. I don’t want to go to Hell.” To some degree, it seems very authentic. I, also, would rather not go to hell. But I think understanding that this is how he sees what he does, and the stakes of what he does, is going to be helpful for understanding why he makes some of the decisions he makes later on.
Monaghan finished up his service with the Marines, and he went in with his brother on buying a pizza place in Ypsilanti, Michigan called DomiNick’s; Monaghan eventually bought out his brother’s share and changed the name. By all accounts, he poured hours and hours into his first shop and the early days of the franchise and lived an austere lifestyle for a long time after the money started coming in; he frequently slept in that Ypsilanti store, and he could make a twelve-inch pepperoni pizza in eleven seconds. He met his wife when he delivered a pizza to a girls' dorm at CMU, which is adorable. By 1985, Dominos was opening three new stores a day, and, again, in those early days, Monaghan was willing to roll up his sleeves and make the pizzas and sleep in the stores himself. His obsessive work ethic and reluctance to delegate will keep coming up, and remember, one more time, this guy's driving motivation is "I don't know. I don't want to go to Hell." If you had to work to keep yourself out of Hell, you'd work yourself to the bone, and you'd insist on doing it all yourself; how could you trust someone else with something this important? As we will see later he will eventually become reluctant to delegate any tasks, including those that are not at all his to delegate.
CHAPTER TWO - THAT CLASSIC 80S IMPULSE PURCHASE
"During the building of the cathedral in Nicaragua, protests were organized outside Tom's parish church of St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Ann Arbor, as protestors used the mantra 'bread not bricks'. Tom felt the protests were absurd considering he was giving the people in this extremely poor country jobs to feed their families. He also believed that by building the cathedral they would have bread that would feed their souls."
In the seventies and eighties, Monaghan had full-onset Rich Guy Brain, and the first stage of Rich Guy Brain is buying more fancy stuff than you'll ever need. He purchased multiple luxury cars and helicopters, bought his favorite sports team the Detroit Tigers (and promptly took them to a World Series), and began construction on a mansion inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's prairie style of architecture. He also appears to have funded the Contras in Nicaragua, that classic 80s impulse purchase. At this point, Monaghan was indistinguishable from most other Reagan-era executives; he expanded his business and net worth as quickly as possible and didn't concern himself with how many workers he had to trample over to do it.
To some degree, Monaghan does get credit for building his wealth up from zero, rather than inheriting it, and for spending part of his early career working directly in the Ypsilanti store. But I still don't think there's a way to become a billionaire that isn't inherently exploitative. Monaghan, like every boss, was vocally anti-union, even going so far as to blame the entire federal deficit on the presence of unions in America; long after Monaghan left the company, delivery drivers at Dominos eventually did unionize. The executives at Dominos were overwhelmingly male and white. In the late nineties, Monaghan ended up selling Dominos to private equity vultures at Bain Capital, who were very aggressive in stripping the company down to its most profitable parts.
Shortly before the sale of Dominos though, Monaghan was thinking a little bit more about the legacy he was supposed to leave behind. He was reading theologians and philosophers like GK Chesterton, Ralph Martin, and CS Lewis, and the latter's words on the sin of pride in Mere Christianity served as a wake-up call for Monaghan. He realized that he had been too focused on amassing wealth, and decided to radically re-orient his life towards supporting Catholic causes. He sold off the Tigers and the luxury cars, and canceled the construction of his prairie style mansion, which remains unfinished. He would later publicly state that he wished to "die broke" and start giving his fortune away in the name of the church.
He paid $3.5 million to help construct a new cathedral in Nicaragua, once he was no longer funding the Contras there; funding the cathedral involved partnering with several high-profile conservative bishops, including Bernard Law, who would go on to become the bad guy in Spotlight. In 1985, he funded the Vatican's efforts to publish the first new Catechism of the Catholic Church in half a millennium. He later began work on producing and funding a biopic on the life of Pope John Paul II, but eventually abandoned the idea. He was asked in the early 2000s to invest in the film The Passion of the Christ, but ended up declining. Passion, of course, went on to become an enormous box office success, and while I forget the name of the director, I'm sure he continues to be viewed as an exemplar of Catholic morality, whoever he is.
Monaghan also drew on his Catholicism to bankroll initiatives in Michigan politics, and you'll never guess what issue he focused on just kidding obviously it was abortion. As Monaghan put it, "all the other [issues] - whether we’re going to have a high minimum wage, high taxes or low taxes - don’t matter. We’ve got to stop killing babies.” I don't think he did this intentionally, but Monaghan did dismiss the importance of issues that would have materially affected his business interests in favor of something that didn't touch his bottom line at all. He gave six figures worth of funding to successfully defeat a 1989 pro-choice ballot initiative in Michigan, which inspired nationwide boycotts of Dominos led by NOW.
Dominos continued to grow regardless, and Monaghan continued to plow ahead, one Catholic billionaire beginning to have a real impact on his political landscape. The question that he would naturally ask next is how he could multiply that impact. He founded Legatus, a fraternal organization of Catholic CEOs each worth at least $7.5 million who consider themselves “ambassadors for Christ in the marketplace”. Legatus is still around today; for the most part it looks like they organize guest speakers, “date nights” that start with praying the rosary, and annual trips to the Vatican for papal audiences. In a 1999 piece, the New York Times interviewed a small handful of Legatus’ 1,300 executive members - over 30 of which were women! That’s almost 2.5 percent! - to confirm that they are exactly like all of the other extremely rich people in the world. One health care CEO in Michigan offered that “I see myself as Christ's ambassador to the marketplace of health care, I believe there is a terrible hunger for faith right now, and I want to tap into that energy and evangelize the marketplace.” Another tech CEO in Indiana, who had just laid off 75 of his employees, also gave a quote:
“This was personally very humbling. As chief executive, I felt I had done something wrong to get us into that situation. The Golden Rule says treat people as you wish to be treated. I apologized to the workers, [and] asked for their cooperation and forgiveness.”
Okay, so just like all of the other extremely rich people in the world except slightly more polite. Keep in mind that in this era, the teaching offices of the church were becoming increasingly critical of Reagan-era unfettered capitalism. The USCCB had released their “Economic Justice For All” letter in 1986, which specifically called out the failures of our economy in the forms of homelessness, unemployment, job insecurity, the shrinking social safety net, and overall assaults on the dignity of the working class. Pope John Paul II would release Centesimus Annus in 1991, reaffirming the now century-old teachings of the church on the preferential option the church exercises towards the poor and those who labor.
Still, by the 2000s, Monaghan is comfortable with where he's ended up. He's built a great business and cashed it out, made plenty of rich Catholic friends, and is happy to donate his fortune away for the rest of his life in the name of the church. But he ran into Ralph Martin, one of the philosophers he enjoyed reading so much, and had a conversation that changed everything. As Ralph Martin put it:
"One of the most significant conversations, it turned out, was when Tom said he was planning to give a lot of money to a Catholic institution that I knew was in a state of doctrinal and moral confusion. I pointed that out to him and showed him the evidence. He was shocked that not everything that had the name "Catholic" attached to it was really Catholic in terms of being faithful to Church teaching. That began his own process of growth and discernment."
So Monaghan, a man who we know can work obsessively on projects and be hesitant to delegate, was just told by one of his heroes that he can't just give his fortune away to any institution calling itself Catholic, because he might be unknowingly supporting heretics. And Monaghan doesn’t just want to give directly to charity; as he once put it to the Detroit Free Press, “I don’t want to waste what little money I have just bringing up people’s standards of living so they can get in a position where they can raise hell and sin all the more.”
Instead, an idea started to gestate in Monaghan's head that he could build his own parallel institution and closely manage it himself, and grow it into something much bigger and holier than the apparent hellhole that Martin had steered him away from. And that apparent hellhole was the University of Notre Dame.
CHAPTER THREE - THE SWEATY WOMB OF FLORIDA
"Many would refer to Ave Maria in the years to come as the 'bubble' that kept the 'real world' out, but for those who have been blessed to be part of it, they would say it is more like a womb where Our Blessed Mother nurtures, God the Father protects, Jesus provides and the Holy Spirit gives birth to lives ready to serve the Lord!"
Before talking about the Ave Maria project, I want to take a minute and discuss the various books written about Monaghan and the perspectives they offer on this very polarizing man. The above, totally normal-sounding quotation is from Peggy Stinnet, one of Monaghan's multiple biographers. All of the chapter epigraphs in this piece are from her 2015 book A Call to Deliver: Tom Monaghan, Founder of Domino's Pizza and the Miracles and Pilgrimage of Ave Maria University. Monaghan also co-wrote his own autobiography in 1986 and called it Pizza Tiger, which is also what I would title his book if I had only eight seconds to think of something. It was written after Monaghan had decided to give his fortune away, but before his major undertakings in politics or the founding of Ave Maria, so we have to go to outside biographies for more information on those projects.
The Monaghan biography that appears to have the most journalistic rigor behind it is James Leonard's Living the Faith: A Life of Tom Monaghan from 2012. While the biography is unauthorized, Leonard had remarkable access to Monaghan and the people who worked with him, especially at Ave Maria. Monaghan was largely very forthcoming to Leonard about his business interests, faith life, and philanthropy. Leonard is a lapsed Catholic and took an admittedly skeptical view of some aspects of the Ave Maria project, but in the portions of the book that I read, he clearly did his homework, and most of the reporting I found on scandals and legal challenges at Ave Maria seems to validate Leonard's skepticism.
Then, four years later, Catholic professor and biographer Joseph Pearce wrote Monaghan: A Life, the thesis of which appears to be "James Leonard is mean and how dare he write a book critical of Tom Monaghan." I know this because shortly after publishing his book, he posted an essay on The Imaginative Conservative, which has become my new all-time favorite website title. Pearce decried Leonard's book as:
"One of the most vitriolic biographies ever written. Throughout its almost four hundred sprawling and largely self-opinionated pages, the author makes little or no effort to either sympathize or empathize with his subject, preferring instead to sit in supercilious judgment, passing sentence with barely-concealed scorn on every aspect of Tom Monaghan’s life and beliefs. As I read this biography, I was appalled by the pride and prejudice of the author and by the catalogue of rudimentary factual errors which protruded with irritating regularity from its pages."
Holy shit. This goes on for thousands of words. Pearce's essay was essentially an adaptation of the forward to his book, and he would not stop picking apart Leonard for misquoting Catholic prayers or misrepresenting Catholic devotions:
"One more example of Mr. Leonard’s ignorance of the Catholic faith, in which he was clearly not educated, in spite of his many years at so-called Catholic schools, is his observation that he saw people in the Ave Maria Oratory “admiring the Stations of the Cross.” Astonishingly, for one who claims to have been a Catholic for a large chunk of his life, Mr. Leonard seems unaware that Catholics do not “admire” the Stations of the Cross, as though they were tourists in an art museum; on the contrary, they wander from one Station to the next, meditating on the suffering of Christ and praying for forgiveness of their sins."
Pearce bloviated for pages and pages like the kid in your high school who always wore LifeTeen shirts, and I hadn't even started his book yet. Rest assured it is exactly what you expect. Here's a snippet of chapter one:
"The world into which Thomas Stephen Monaghan was born, on March 25, 1937, was not that different from the world in which we find ourselves today. There were wars in various parts of the world, governments were becoming bigger and more powerful, and the traditional family and the traditional understanding of marriage were under attack."
Ok I'm sold. I suppose Pearce is correct that the 1930s were a time of great upheaval internationally, as fascist governments began to take power in Europe and another world war began to loom. What was happening in the states at that time?
"If the world at large had gone dark with devildom at the time of Tom Monaghan’s entry into it, things were not much brighter closer to home. As his mother went into labor in Ann Arbor, the sixty-three thousand workers at the six Chrysler plants in nearby Detroit were in the midst of a major strike that would cost the company $26 million. On a lighter note, it was revealed on the day of Monaghan’s birth that the Quaker Oats Company was paying the recently retired baseball giant Babe Ruth $25,000 per year to advertise its product."
Hell yes. Fascism is on the rise, the Holocaust is about to happen, and in America we have something almost as horrifying to Pearce: the labor movement. I had to include the Babe Ruth sentence in there to emphasize that the Chrysler strike, and the lost revenue for the people who ran Chrysler, is the only example Pearce shares of times being dark close to Monaghan's home, before switching to some of the lighter pop culture stuff. This should give you an idea of Pearce's personal politics, why he idolizes Monaghan, and how he intends to frame his biography, as a detailed, in-house look at the faith of, in Pearce's estimation, one of the most important living American Catholics. Also, strangely, the copyright to Pearce’s book is in Monaghan's name, not Pearce's; I only caught it when I was looking up the publication date.
Pearce wrote a fawning biography from the perspective of an imperious professor who will accept no criticism of this paragon of the faith. If you want a fawning biography from the perspective of a mom who moved across the country in 2007 just because she thought Tom Monaghan was cool, then you would pick up Peggy Stinnet's book with its weird metaphors about the sweaty womb of Florida. I read Stinnet's book in full, and it is crammed full of jaw-dropping quotes from the members of the Ave Maria community, all presented with wide-eyed credulity and a liberal amount of exclamation points. Stinnet's The Call to Deliver is the perfect portrait of how those inside Ave Maria view their community, and makes reading about the actual shortfalls of Ave Maria even more of a sucker punch.
CHAPTER FOUR - THE PIZZAS OF OPPORTUNITY
"As this new town and university began to take form, one could only think of the mile long rows of tomatoes and peppers that once covered these grounds. Tomatoes that were possibly used to make the pizzas that were now delivering opportunities to produce the miracle that would continue far into the future."
Ave Maria College and later University, and Ave Maria School of Law (all referred to AMU throughout for simplicity) originally started in Michigan, but as Monaghan continued to butt heads with local governments over developing the land, he eventually moved everything to a remote area in southwestern Florida in 2002, near the town of Immokalee, after working out a sweetheart deal with real estate developer Barron Collier. Monaghan’s vision was simple: a great, world-class university that would also be totally faithful to the teachings of the Catholic magisterium. As he put it to the New York Times:
“For 25 years, I've felt the need for a school with more spirituality. The reason God created us was to earn heaven, so we could be with him, and my goal is to help more people get to heaven. You can't follow the rules of God unless you know what they are and why they are. At some Catholic universities, students graduate with their religious faith more shaky than when they arrive.”
William Bennet, former Secretary of Education under Reagan and a lecturer at AMU, echoed this sentiment in the same Times piece: ''I'm a Catholic; I'm a great admirer of Tom Monaghan; and a good case can be made for a traditional, strongly proud Catholic university. There's a lot of Catholic universities that you wouldn't know were Catholic.'' All of the reporting on AMU as it was getting started up in Florida, as well as all of the biographies of Monaghan, speak to this specific vision: Monaghan felt that some Catholic universities, like Notre Dame - to whom Monaghan would repeatedly compare AMU when discussing his vision; most notably when imagining the future of the athletics program, including his promise in a 2002 Chicago Tribune piece to field a Division I football team as soon as possible - had strayed too far from church teaching in the name of maintaining their academic freedom and building up their national profile. Those schools weren't "really" Catholic.
Maybe there’s something to that; several Catholic universities, including Notre Dame, have explicitly affirmed their commitment to academic freedom and independence from the Catholic magisterium, notably in the 1967 “Land O Lakes” statement by some Catholic university presidents. Other Catholic universities rejected that mindset as borderline heretical, kept in lockstep with their bishops on every aspect of academic and student life, and remained bastions of conservative Catholicism. You can tell the two apart because the universities in the first group are the ones you’ve actually heard of.
To realize his vision of somehow threading the needle of academic excellence and adherence to church doctrine, Monaghan gathered together a dream team of colleagues in Catholicism, especially his friends at the conservative Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. I’ve listed out all of the members of Monaghan’s “Christus Magister” brain trust below, along with their titles and professions, see if you can spot the odd man out, the one man who wasn’t working in Catholicism or academia:
Fr. Michael Scanlan, university president
Dr. Michael J. Healey, philosophy professor
Dr. David Schindler, dean of the John Paul II Institute in Washington DC
Mary Ann Glendon, law professor and eventual US Ambassador to the Vatican
Kenneth Whitehead, author of several works on liturgical theology
Ralph Martin, philosophy professor
Fr. Joseph Fessio SJ, publisher and university president
Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Denver and eventually Philadelphia
Jim Holman, journalist and creator of multiple Catholic monthly newspapers
Nick Healy, university vice president
Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR, Franciscan friar, broadcaster, and psychology professor
Tom Monaghan, pizza mogul
Monaghan got a wide range of very accomplished clergy and academics on his board; none of them would end up having any meaningful impact on the vision or direction of the university, compared to Monaghan’s near-absolute power, as the guy who had the money, to bring his vision to life.
In addition to the undergraduate college, Monaghan also prioritized the rapid development of AMU's law school, explicitly hoping to produce lawyers and judges to support Catholic causes in the arena of the federal government. The law school grew out of a project Monaghan started in 1999, the Thomas More Law Center, an advocacy group that provided legal support to Monaghan's favorite causes and made some, uh, unexpected allies, as Stinnet inadvertently notes:
"The Thomas More Law Center has been involved in numerous other cases through the years that have received national attention, such as the Terry Schiavo case, the removal of the Mt. Soledad cross in California, and defending Alabama Chief Judge Roy Moore when he was ordered to remove the Ten Commandments from the state's Supreme Court Building. The TMLC also defended Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani, who was criminally charged for the legitimate combat action taken by four of his Marines who were ambushed by insurgents in Iraq in 2005, and whose case was made the political scapegoat by anti-war politicians and the liberal media."
First of all, come the fuck on, Roy Moore isn't even Catholic. Second, he's a sexual predator, and he still comes across as the second-worst client of the TMLC behind the accused war criminal. With this framework in place for a decade before the school started, AMU continues to train attorneys today to, I assume, defend the sex and war criminals of the next generation.
Monaghan realized in 2007 that AMU by itself wouldn't be enough to realize his full vision; the university needed to be supported by a heavily-planned, brand-new Catholic city of Ave Maria, one designed with a massive church - well, technically an oratory - at the center of town, one that would allow Monaghan to vertically integrate the operations of the university with nearby primary and secondary education, as well as the commercial and residential landscape of the city. Who would move to this Catholic stronghold in the swamps of Florida? Transplants to the new city included Andrew Emmans, interviewed for Stinnet's book:
"Somehow, by the grace of God, I was able to convince my wife to journey out to Florida, ostensibly merely to take two years to finish my university education, but with the wild hope (which I dared not voice) that both my wife and I would fall in love with the town and the university and that she would meet great Catholic wives and mothers, she would convert, and that we would stay in Ave, and that we would raise our children (totaling three at the time) in an environment more conducive to their intellectual and moral development."
Fellas, you ever lie to your wife and move your entire family from California to Florida on the off chance that your wife would change religions and radically re-orient her life for you? Emmans is perhaps uniquely deceptive, but the main draw of the town for all of the transplants was the opportunity to live in a good, faithful, Catholic community. People wanted to recognize their neighbors at church, and wanted their children to learn the Catechism (the Catechism that Monaghan funded the publication of) together. They didn't want to have to worry about the morality of their local government, either. Monaghan has a now-infamous quote from his early days designing the town:
"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.”
Inexplicably, this didn't win over the general public, and the ACLU threatened to sue the city. Fortunately, Monaghan was able to fix everything, and get everyone to think he was normal, in a follow-up interview:
"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."
Terrific, that's all cleared up then. In Monaghan's speeches over the first year of the full Ave Maria project, he often spoke on his more specific 70-year vision for the university and city. His vision will leave you speechless, although maybe not for the reasons he thinks:
"If the numbers continue to grow, by the year 2078 there will be 4,000 faithful priests, some of whom will already have become bishops; 2,500 sisters, many of them teaching in Catholic schools around the country; the university will have built an outstanding education program and trained some 12,000 Catholic school teachers...Graduates could include 5,000 honest lawyers added to our society, with many of them becoming judges or pro-life politicians, and 300 alumni working in the media. There will be 40,000 holy, Catholic marriages, and these couples who will be faithful to Humanae Vitae [and avoid using birth control] will have a projected 150,000 children, many of whom will become priests and religious as well - the possibility of 500,000 grandchildren."
So Monaghan is being very honest about what this is. He doesn't just want to build a world-class university, he wants to remake the entire American Catholic population in his image by incubating it in southern Florida. He's in year one and he's already calculating birth rates, investing in radio stations to spread his message, and figuring out how to get his people on the bench and in the episcopate so the new wave of Catholics also has meaningful, lasting political power. This would terrify me, except that Monaghan's only experience is in running a pizza company, so he doesn't know what he's doing, and he’s not going to let anyone else do it for him, and I'm pleased to report that over the past decade, he has been repeatedly sabotaging the project with his own dumbass decisions.
CHAPTER FIVE - A BLANK SHEET OF PAPER
"It helped that AMU could start from scratch with a blank sheet of paper so that the university was able to avoid many of the pitfalls that other established schools had fallen into, with the most important being the issue of tenure."
That's right: AMU doesn't offer its professors any tenure. Instead, professors are hired on contracts that are up for renewal every one to three years. The university continues to attract and hire the finest Catholic academics in the world, just as long as they're okay with not having the main benefit in academia that gives you job stability and freedom in your research. But not granting tenure allowed Monaghan to run the university exactly the way he wanted; for example, he could quickly fire professors if they brought up uncomfortable subjects like the time he kind of sort of committed fraud.
Kate Ernsting was one such professor; she filed a complaint with the US Department of Education over irregularities in transferring academic credits from Michigan to Florida, when AMU was only accredited in the former state. Ernsting's office was shuttered and she lost her job. As she said in Leonard's book:
"In Tom's mind, the mission is bigger and more important than any one person. People are benefited by being part of the mission, and to Tom that's all the benefit they should need. But of course the mission is entirely owned by Tom and any benefit is entirely Tom's.…Tom is what I'd call invincibly ignorant. If he thinks it's right, it's right.…I'm terrified of Tom Monaghan.”
Ernsting was only one of several professors fired for daring to do something Monaghan didn’t like. Once he was in Florida and technically owned most of the professors' homes, he could also foreclose on the houses of professors he really didn't like, which he allegedly did as recently as this year. Back in the 2000s, though, many of the AMU faculty were upset when Monaghan asked them to pack up and move from Ann Arbor, an established university town, to a remote unincorporated piece of Florida swampland. Monaghan said it was his way or the highway. Unfortunately, some of the people he said that to were law professors, who led a revolt against Monaghan in 2006, slapping him left and right with legal challenges. Monaghan fired most of those professors but got soaked in settlements and the law school basically had to start again in Florida from scratch without its high-profile faculty. The law school now has less than half of its graduates passing the bar, giving it the worst rate of any law school in Florida.
In terms of the spiritual life of the city, Monaghan had everything under control. I mean that literally, the spiritual life was being directly controlled by Tom Monaghan. When I said earlier that Ave Maria’s church was technically an oratory, there’s a specific reason for that: the bishop wouldn’t let Monaghan call the building a church. See, it couldn’t technically be a church because for the first decade that the oratory was around, Monaghan owned it outright, as opposed to the building being owned by the diocese of Venice, FL. In case you’re wondering how many Catholic churches are actually owned by their respective diocese, the answer is “all of the other ones, every single one, without exception”. Ave Maria had the only Catholic church, at all, that was owned by a private citizen and not the institution of the church itself (the church was eventually sold to the diocese of Venice in 2017). Now, the local bishop, Frank Dewane, thought it was unusual, but not nearly as unusual as Monaghan’s wanting to pick his own pastor for Ave Maria instead of having the bishop appoint someone, which is something that would never happen! Ave Maria was created to be a community fully in line with the church hierarchy, except that Monaghan was deciding what that meant instead of the actual church hierarchy. The oratory had become Catholic equivalent of the Clickhole piece “It’s Our Duty To Support The Troops And The Second Amendment In Case We Ever Need To Kill Them All”.
As you would expect, this developed in a totally normal way. Bishop Dewane wouldn’t come dedicate the oratory until Monaghan eased up and allowed him to appoint a pastor; the oratory couldn’t be used to celebrate Mass until that happened. Monaghan responded like a boss; “like a boss” here means less like a cool badass and more like someone used to being a CEO with near-absolute power over the people that he thought worked for him. He literally locked out the bishop. He fucking padlocked the church, only using it for fundraisers, until he and Dewane finally worked things out and Dewane was able to appoint someone.
Monaghan and the real estate developers at Barron Collier also had the city life under control, again literally. Barron Collier had pretty much absolute power in governing the plot of land they were developing, including overseeing taxation and all that comes with it: public works, public safety, public education. The Florida state legislature set up deals like this all of the time when real estate developers wanted to start building new towns on unincorporated land in the state, and usually wrote a ten-year clock into the deal, after which a local government would be established or delegated to the county. You'll never guess which development they didn't put a clock on.
Yes, as the Miami New Times reported - amazingly, on a tip from a conservative Catholic blogger who was pissed about her home value plummeting - Barron Collier has pretty much absolute power to run and govern Ave Maria however they want, for as long as they want. There are no local officials or elections. As it turns out, Barron Collier is terrible at running a town; they still don't have their own police force, amenities are in disrepair if Tom Monaghan doesn't want to fund them, and Leonard's book details at length how the city feels like a half-finished, sprawled out ghost town. Monaghan saw the nearby town of Immokalee, famously home to a large population of low-income migrant farm workers, as an opportunity for the residents of Ave to direct their charity and corporal works of mercy. As Leonard puts it in his book, things turned out differently: "The biggest difference between Ave Maria and Immokalee was that there were people everywhere in Immokalee—people walking, talking, standing on corners, sitting on front stoops, leaning out of windows."
CHAPTER SIX - A VERY NORMAL PLACE, WITH NORMAL STUDENTS
"Little did Tom Monaghan know when he flipped those first pizzas that the Lord was going to use them to bring about such a great good. From the tomato seeds that were once cultivated and grown in these fields, to being crushed and 'delivered' as pizza to countless homes and college dorms, God has now revealed to us His plan and His miracle - to deliver souls to heaven. And this is Ave Maria!"
The athletic program was also intended to be a cornerstone of AMU; Monaghan dreamed of fielding a Division I football team that could beat Notre Dame (I can’t be the only one who thinks that if they wanted to, the Vatican could put together a football team and dominate the NCAA). This was a hilarious dream to have in the 2000s, a decade which saw Notre Dame fire three head coaches and endure multiple sub-.500 seasons, made all the more hilarious by AMU firing four head coaches in the same length of time and going 0-10 in 2016. Monaghan’s original plan was to build a 10,000 seat stadium and start with a Division I-AA (FCS) team; currently, the stadium holds 1,000, is often half-filled for games, and hosts a team that doesn’t play in the NCAA Division I, II, or III, but rather the NAIA, described by the Naples Daily News as “home mostly to small schools with negligible resources and equally minimal fan support”, a devastating own in their larger 2017 piece “Gyrenes Far From Founding Vision” (AMU’s mascot is the Gyrenes, an old nickname for members of the Marine Corps, but also their logo is a bulldog, because why would they start thinking things through as this point).
Part of the reason for this disaster is that Monaghan finally stopped dumping money into the university in 2011, eventually calling his investment in the Ave Maria project “a bloodbath” in an interview with Bloomberg. Monaghan grew tired of putting up $5 million a year to maintain the roadways and general public services; unlike previous investments he had made as a billionaire and restaurateur, paying to keep a city and university going didn't give him a direct return on investment. AMU is still running a multi-million dollar deficit.
The athletics budget was reduced severely after the money dried up, and that only happened because Monaghan had to be persuaded to cut the athletics budget rather than cancel the construction of a classroom building, for PR purposes; he later fired the Jesuit priest and board member that told him to do that. Things weren't better in AMU’s other sports. The university caused a stir in the sports media when they fired men's basketball coach Ricky Benitez in 2008 for swearing during practice; Sports Illustrated named it their weekly Sign of the Apocalypse. Benitez was a high-profile hire for the university as he had played for the Puerto Rican national team and worked as an NBA scout; it later turned out that Benitez had been lying about both of those things and that AMU had never figured it out because they had no idea how to check resumes or build a program from scratch. At one point shortly after Benitez left, all but three of the school’s basketball players had left or transferred, and while I’m sure the Trinitarian numerology was appreciated by some, this is widely considered an insufficient number of players with which to field a college basketball team. The AMU athletics program, expected to be a crown jewel of the whole Ave Maria project, can most charitably be described as "unfinished", just like Monaghan's prairie-style Michigan mansion and John Paul II documentary.
Has Monaghan at least succeeded in attracting the ultra-conservative Catholic undergrads he wanted at his school? Yes, and while ultra-conservative undergrads are a group famous for being chill about what's happening on college campuses, they have started to revolt against AMU not being conservative enough. These guys just can't win! National Catholic Register, owned by the conservative-leaning Catholic media company EWTN, reported in 2015:
"A vocal chorus of current and former students, including faculty members, have raised concerns over what they perceive to be a weakening of AMU’s overt and distinct Catholicity, as the university increases enrollment and engages the outside world. They point to the administration’s decisions to allow male and female students to visit each other’s dorms, though strictly regulated, and to no longer require the recitation of the Angelus in the school’s dining halls, a move the administration took to accommodate non-Catholic students."
AMU had to start letting in non-Catholic students to increase enrollment, and stopped saying the Angelus devotional prayer in the dining halls in an bare-minimum effort to be more inclusive, and that was a bridge too far for some students (the Register piece also included reporting on the students and alumni realizing that unless faculty were given tenure, there were going to be a lot more sudden firings of professors they liked). Jim Towey, Monaghan's successor as university president, described AMU to the Miami New Times reassuringly as "a very normal place, with normal students"; I cannot imagine how much he was gritting his teeth. Then, Towey immediately corrected himself by adding "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."
For what it's worth, Towey has resigned from his position as university president; he caused too much controversy when he spoke out during the PA grand jury report crisis and suggested that Pope Francis is probably not at the head of a global sex abuse cabal. His position was not shared by some of the archconservatives on AMU's board. In all honesty, while those comments precipitated his firing, he was already in a lot of trouble for covering up alleged sexual misconduct by an AMU professor, which is now the subject of a Title IX investigation. But on the bright side, a Title IX investigation for covering up sexual misconduct is the first thing AMU has in common with America's top-tier universities. Including Notre Dame!
So the very normal students of AMU are upset, and why wouldn't they be? The undergraduate college is being emptied out by attrition and declining enrollment, the president is resigning, and the law school is in the toilet. Monaghan's given up on funding the place, and he's been pushed into the ceremonial role of Chancellor, presumably until AMU gets swallowed up by a limestone sinkhole at some point in the next ten years.
EPILOGUE
Pearce wrote in the forward to his biography that "Few people have done more to shape the Church in the United States in the past thirty years than Tom Monaghan." As it turns out, he's absolutely correct. Monaghan, in using his wealth to throw his weight around, in his singular focus on sexual morality, and in his willingness to build his own world when the real world didn't measure up to his expectations, defined what being a conservative Catholic in modern public life meant. The Catholic-led Federalist Society's pro-life judicial machinery, Rod Dreher's withdrawal into a 'Benedict Option' community, Rick Santorum's campaigning as a 'Catholic missionary in the Senate', and whatever the hell Sohrab Ahmari is trying to do are all descendants of a man who made a pizza fortune and decided to use it to force-fit the world into his understanding of Catholicism.
But Tom Monaghan's understanding of Catholicism goes as far as "I don't know. I don't want to go to hell", and thinks the only thing that matters for staying out of hell is ticking the '“sanctifying grace” box that he learned while reciting the Baltimore Catechism as a child. In a separate interview, when asked why he named everything after Mary, his response was "I don't know, I guess she is my friend." He's not a theologian or a member of the clergy, and he never made it past his first year of college. And if you want to be a good person or a good Catholic, you don't need any of that, but if you want to be the man who fundamentally reshapes the American Catholic church, and don't trust anyone else to run the "saint factory" university you're building, you probably need something more.
Monaghan is not a theologian or a prophet. He is a tycoon who never stopped having Rich Guy Brain. His only qualification for being involved at the highest levels of the Catholic church is that he had a lot of money. And you don't get that much money by viewing the people under you as human beings. You have to cut jobs, make divestitures, squeeze out more profits, and sell to private equity. And when you try to carry those experiences over to the extremely not-for-profit world of building a college town and shepherding a flock of Catholics, you get a revolt from the law school faculty, empty football stadiums, inadvertent fraud, sex scandals, another revolt from conservative students, repeated gaffes that put the ACLU on alert, and a pissing match over choosing your pastor. This man had the resources and the clout to try and end hunger in the state of Michigan, or something similarly audacious; instead, he commissioned a pricey Catholic icon of himself, and the people around him were too scared to call it a bad idea. Monaghan's influence on large, vocal swaths of American Catholics - the idea that your money and your might entitle you to reshape the world as you see fit, no matter who says no or what reality tells you - is felt absolutely every day. And it's a huge problem for the church.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.
Sources used for this piece include:
Peggy Stinnet, A Call to Deliver: Tom Monaghan, Founder of Domino's Pizza and the Miracles and Pilgrimage of Ave Maria University (2015)
James Leonard, Living the Faith: A Life of Tom Monaghan (2012)
Joseph Pearce, Monaghan: A Life (2016)
The New Yorker - “The Deliverer” (2007)
The Chronicle of Philanthropy - “Delivering on His Word” (1999)
Agenda - “The Tom Monaghan/Word of God Connection” (1989)
New York Times - “Taking the Gospel to the Rich” (1999)
The Imaginative Conservative - “The Gutter or the Stars: Two Views of a Pizza Billionaire” (2017)
New York Times - “A Catholic College, A Billionaire’s Idea, Will Rise in Florida” (2003)
Chicago Tribune - “Pizza Fortune Funding Florida Catholic College” (2002)
Collier Citizen - “What’s Up in Ave Maria: Academic freedom and faculty rights gain national attention” (2016)
Miami New Times - “Ave Maria University: A Catholic Project Gone Wrong” (2011)
Naples Daily News - “Problems Follow Former Ave Maria Basketball Coach to Mexico” (2008)
Naples Daily News - “Former Ave Maria Basketball Coach’s Background In Doubt” (2008)
New York Times - “Our Lady of Discord” (2006)
Naples Daily News - “Gyrenes Far From Founding Vision” (2017)
Naples Daily News - “Former Ave Maria professor who sued university alleging retaliation may lose his home” (2019)
Inside Higher Ed - “Foreclosing on a Faculty Critic” (2019)
Simcha Fisher - “Lawsuit Alleges Coverup of Scandalous Acts at Ave Maria” (2018)
Catholic World Report - “Amid controversy, Ave Maria University president will step down in 2020” (2018)
National Catholic Register - “Growing Pains at Ave Maria University” (2015)
Naples Daily News - “Ave Maria U. Board Accused of Manipulating Funds (2016)