Tom Monaghan always believed that someday he would be rich, and when that day finally came, courtesy of a Domino’s Pizza empire, he knew just how to proceed. 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. (For a Wright dining suite he spent $1.6 million.) 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. As a child in Michigan, Monaghan had found consolation in fanatically following the exploits of the Detroit Tigers; in the autumn of 1983, he bought the team.

The sale of the Tigers came as a surprise to Detroiters. The team was one of the game’s great old franchises, but it had gone fifteen seasons without a title. John Fetzer, a baseball patrician who had owned the Tigers since the nineteen-fifties, didn’t believe in the new economics of free agency and had refused to enter the bidding wars over ballplayers. But the team had glaring needs, notably at first base and on the left side of the plate. By Christmas, two months after Monaghan’s purchase, the Tigers had signed the veteran free-agent slugger Darrell Evans—a left-handed hitter who could play first base.

The following April, in the first Opening Day game of the Tom Monaghan era, Evans hit a three-run home run. Detroit won that game, and the next, and prevailed in thirty-five of its first forty games—an unprecedented streak that also featured a no-hitter by Jack Morris. Detroit fans watched, amazed, as the team compiled a hundred and four victories before sweeping the playoffs, and then winning the World Series. After the final out of the Series, the fans’ exuberance overflowed into the streets, and cars were overturned and burned. Hundreds of sportswriters and other stragglers were stranded inside Tiger Stadium when they suddenly heard the sound of a helicopter overhead. It descended toward the field and settled on the dirt behind second base. It was Monaghan’s Sikorsky S-76, delivering several hundred pizzas from Domino’s.

Buying the Tigers made Monaghan, who was forty-six, a celebrity. Journalists streamed to his office at Domino’s Farms, in Ann Arbor, a low-slung headquarters building in the Frank Lloyd Wright style, framed in a picture-book pastoral setting complete with a herd of buffalo. The visitors noted the rosewood décor and other such trappings, as well as Monaghan’s apparent humility, his clean life style, and his endearing physical aspect. “His eyes are sincere and alert,” one wrote. “Unlined skin and thick brown hair make him appear 10 years younger than he is.” The source of Monaghan’s wealth—a fast-food chain—was not especially glamorous, but reporters wrote that he lacked the bluster and imperiousness of such peers as the broadcaster Ted Turner and the shipping magnate George Steinbrenner.

“Everything was positive,” Monaghan recently reflected, a bit wistfully. “A lot of Horatio Alger stuff. Nothing controversial.”

That was before Monaghan decided that his real purpose in life was not baseball, or even the pizza business, but to get as many people as possible into Heaven, starting with himself. He resolved to use his wealth (“God’s money,’’ he said) to somehow rescue the Catholic Church from what he saw as its slide toward apostasy. 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. Finally, it led him to the edge of the Corkscrew Swamp, in southwest Florida. There, Monaghan means to build a university that will be more Catholic than the University of Notre Dame, surrounded by a new town that will reflect traditional Catholic values. He has committed the bulk of his fortune to the undertaking. In Monaghan’s vision, Ave Maria—the name of the school, and the town—will be capable, he said, of “changing the world.”

I met Monaghan last autumn, in Florida, toward the end of what had been a difficult year for his Ave Maria project. His face is no longer unlined, and his hair has grayed; he wears rimless spectacles, like those of Donald Rumsfeld, and a hearing aid in each ear. His eyes remain intent. He acknowledged that there had been problems in Florida, partly of his own making. The groundbreaking ceremony had been delayed by storms, and although construction was well under way, rising costs had forced a scaling back of the cathedral at the center of the new town, and of the first phase of the university. It had been harder to attract donors than Monaghan had hoped. There had been terrible publicity after Monaghan said, in a speech to a Catholic men’s group, “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.” The A.C.L.U. forecast lawsuits, and on Today Katie Couric asked whether “this is really infringing on civil liberties and freedom of speech and right to privacy and all sorts of basic tenets this country was founded on.” Monaghan spent weeks denying that he was building what critics called a “Catholic Jonestown.”

In a series of conversations, Monaghan seemed to betray a hint of despair, once describing the project as “nothing but a hole for money,” and again as “a short-term disaster.” But he said he remained resolute.

“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,” he said. “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.”

A few days later, when I was visiting Monaghan in Ann Arbor, he showed me a black-and-white snapshot of his parents, Francis and Anna, taken in the nineteen-thirties. They were a handsome young couple, but bore that vaguely doubtful air commonly seen in Depression-era photographs. Monaghan’s religious formation did not come from his family life at home; very little did.

Tom, the older of two boys, idolized his father. Francis drove a truck for a living, and built their small home himself. Monaghan remembers following like a puppy as his father worked on the house, and sneaking off after him when Francis left the house on an errand. “This guy was a handsome guy,” he told me. “He looked like Robert Stack.” It is striking that Monaghan remembers his father so vividly. Francis Monaghan suffered from severe ulcers, and on Christmas Eve, 1941, he became desperately ill, and died from internal bleeding. Tom was not yet five.

Anna Monaghan was earning $27.50 a week as a domestic worker. She wanted to return to school, for nurse’s training, and decided that she could not care for Tom and his younger brother, Jim, by herself. She sent the boys to a series of foster homes, where they’d stay for a few weeks at a time. And then one day, when Tom was six, his mother delivered her sons to an orphanage.

The St. Joseph’s Home for Boys, in Jackson, Michigan, was a high-Victorian mansion, its stairways always in need of sweeping, and its bannisters in need of polishing—work done by the boys. Tom got into a fight on his first day, and spent every day thereafter longing for his mother to come and take him back. The orphanage was run by Felician nuns, a community of Polish women, who kept the boys on a strict regimen. The third floor of the old house had been converted into a dormitory, with rows of small beds with metal-tube frames, each separated by a wooden chair, upon which the boys laid their clothes at night. The boys attended a local Catholic school along with children from the town. “We saw how all the other kids were, and what they had,” he said. “We were not allowed to have money, and we had to have very plain clothes.” The nuns served surplus food from local restaurants and groceries, which included a seemingly bottomless supply of turnips. Discipline was maintained with a strap, administered by a feared nun named Sister Ladislaus.

When the boys weren’t occupied at school or work there was daily Mass, long morning and evening prayers, and regular confession, in addition to the religious instruction at school. This compulsory religion might have become another of the miseries of the place if it hadn’t been for the influence of one nun, Sister Mary Berarda. In Monaghan’s memory, Sister Berarda was beatific, with a kind manner and a soft Polish accent, and brought to her vocation something like genuine love. “She was very kind,” he said. “She was everything. She was our mother, and our father.” Sister Berarda was his schoolteacher, too, and although Tom was a good student he tended to daydream, and was often caught short in class. When Tom announced to the class that he would someday become a priest, or a ballplayer, or an architect—or maybe all three—Sister Berarda smiled and told him, “Tom, if anyone can do it, it’s you.” The one thing she asked him to promise her, he said, was that he would be good.

“If I didn’t have those couple of years with Sister Berarda, I don’t even know if I’d be in the Church,” Monaghan said. “I got my foundation, my formation, right there. I have no doubt that she was really a holy person who was always in the presence of God. She made it believable to me.” Years later, after he became a famous success, Sister Berarda told a newspaper reporter that she remembered Tom as “an unusual child . . . when he came to chapel, he really prayed.”

In 1949, Anna Monaghan returned to fetch her sons, six years after dropping them off. She had found a nursing job in Traverse City, on Lake Michigan. Tom was twelve, and he remembers the joy he felt at her arrival. “But that didn’t work out too well,” he said. Tom was too full of adolescent spirit, and Anna was too long removed from parenting. They argued bitterly, and within a year she’d put the boys back into foster care.

Some of the homes were better than others (a stay with a farm family inspired Domino’s Farms), and from time to time Anna took the boys home for another try, always with the same unhappy result. Finally, she signed papers committing Tom to a juvenile-detention home. His father’s sister rescued him after a few months and brought him to Ann Arbor, where he finished high school. Monaghan ranked last in his graduating class, but he was finally free.

Monaghan’s childhood stimulated a prodigious inner life. He was given to reveries in which he constructed detailed scenes from the life of a rich and successful Tom Monaghan. He spent hours designing imaginary homes, furnishing them to the last corner with items he’d seen in department-store catalogues—always the best. This activity led to his obsession with Frank Lloyd Wright, and a determination to study architecture at the University of Michigan.

But college—if he could get in—required money, so Monaghan looked for work in Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Chicago, without success. He was walking past the post office in Harvey, Illinois, when he noticed an armed-forces recruiting station. He told the recruiter that he was interested in the Army, and, with his encouragement, he enlisted. Once he had signed the papers and taken his physical examination, another enlistee informed him that he’d just joined the U.S. Marines.

Monaghan had a relatively uneventful tour with the corps. In his fantasy life, meanwhile, he became fixated on Bemidji, Minnesota, a small community in the Northwoods country, a town where he had never been, but where he was convinced his destiny lay. He subscribed to the Bemidji newspapers and read them cover to cover; he wrote to the Bemidji Chamber of Commerce; he got in touch with real-estate agents, and came close to purchasing a forty-acre spread. He determined to visit Bemidji on his next furlough, but his plane was diverted to Detroit, and that ended his Bemidji phase.

As it turned out, Detroit was much closer to Monaghan’s destiny than Bemidji. After his discharge from the Marines, in 1959, he lost all his savings in an oil-well scheme. He was twenty-two years old, and pretty much where he’d been before he joined the corps. Then his brother, Jim, who had become a mailman, told him about a business opportunity that he’d learned about on his route. A man in Ypsilanti wanted to sell his pizzeria, cheap. Jim had worked briefly in a pizza parlor, and could get a loan from a local credit union. Monaghan figured that he and Jim could split shifts at the pizza shop, leaving Tom enough time to study. They borrowed nine hundred dollars and bought DomiNick’s Pizza.

Jim soon went back to the post office full time, giving Tom his share of DomiNick’s in exchange for the Volkswagen that they’d been using for deliveries. And Monaghan realized that he wasn’t going to become an architect. “I was stuck,” he said. “I kind of reconciled myself to it by saying, O.K., so I’m going to be a successful businessman.”

Monaghan’s obsessive nature proved to be an asset that outweighed his ignorance of the pizza business. He worked hundred-hour weeks, often sleeping in the shop. He never sat down once he arrived at work, and standing shifts became the rule for all of his employ-ees. When Monaghan got married, in 1962—to Marjorie Zybach, whom he met on a pizza delivery to a college dorm—they moved into a trailer so that he could put money back into the business. When they went on trips, Tom would drive, choosing routes that allowed him to survey pizza operations in other locales.

Now his reveries focussed on fast delivery and “handling the rush”—maximizing output during peak hours. (Monaghan was once timed making a twelve-inch pepperoni pie in eleven seconds.) As the Ypsilanti store flourished—according to Monaghan, it was the busiest pizzeria in the country—he opened other stores, which he now called Domino’s. Over time, he perfected his franchising system. He charged new store owners no franchising fee; instead, he required a potential franchisee to manage an existing Domino’s successfully for a year. When it was time for the opening, a semi-tractor-trailer would arrive, containing everything needed to run the shop, from pizza ovens to the pens used to write down orders. He also pressed manufacturers to design a better pizza box, made of corrugated cardboard to retain heat, which became the industry standard. By 1985, Domino’s was opening nearly three new stores a day, more than any restaurant chain in history.

“I was captain of that ship,” Monaghan said. “I worked my people real hard, and they responded. And that first store was something really special. Every single guy that got married, that worked for me in that era, asked me to be his best man. I worked their tail off, I was tough on them. But I was tougher on myself. That was really exciting, and it was fun.”

Monaghan had become truly rich. “I thought about how I started in business, how I worked so long and hard, went without things, lived in a little tiny mobile home when we first got married,” he recalled. “And then we got pregnant, and we moved into a little bigger mobile home. And then we finally moved into a house, and we didn’t buy any furniture, except the bed and the necessities. I drove home in delivery cars, as much as I loved cars. Wore old, battered clothes. All because I thought, If I make these sacrifices now, I can have more later.” Monaghan was ready to fulfill the deferred promises he’d made to himself—the plane, the cars, the baseball team, a private island. But he was also determined to become the kind of Catholic that would make Sister Berarda proud.

Monaghan had never really felt any doubt about his faith, and had rarely missed Sunday Mass even during his troubled teen-age years in Traverse City. Back then, there had been moments when he was nostalgic for the orphanage, with its ordered routines centered on the comforting rhythms of the ancient worship rituals. And the Heaven-or-Hell formulation seemed essential to him. He had spent much of his young life after the orphanage on the streets, avoiding his mother, and he always believed that if it weren’t for his faith he might have crossed a line from which there was no easy return.

But during the years when he was building Domino’s Monaghan had lapsed into a nominal practice of his religion. He attended church on Sundays, but he arrived late, and got to confession only two or three times a year. When he read that Don Shula, then the coach of the Miami Dolphins, attended Mass every day, Monaghan told himself that if Shula could find the time so could he. He has rarely missed a Mass since.

One day, the priest gave a homily on Marian apparitions, and on how the Virgin Mary at Fátima had urged the praying of the Rosary. Monaghan thought about this, he said, and asked himself, “If she goes to all that trouble, the apparition, and that’s her message, who am I to ignore it?” He was training for a marathon, and began praying the Rosary (a hundred and fifty Hail Marys, punctuated by fifteen Our Fathers, all while contemplating the mysteries of redemption) during a daily run.

In 1983, the year that he bought the Tigers, he established a foundation. Its purpose was to support the Catholic Church; Monaghan believed that there was no greater good he could do. He invited a fellow-parishioner, the Catholic writer Ralph Martin, to Domino’s Farms, where he eagerly told him about his plans. Monaghan expected Martin to be thrilled, but he seemed troubled. “You know, Tom, just because it’s Catholic doesn’t mean it’s correct,” Martin said. “You can give to things that are Catholic and do the Church more harm than good.”

“He explained it to me,” Monaghan said. He remembers Martin telling him about dissidents at Notre Dame, who didn’t accept some of the Church’s fundamental beliefs, such as the bodily resurrection of Christ. “And then he told me about this priest, who was at the school, and he died and they went into his room and they found all kinds of homosexual literature and paraphernalia. And I said, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding! At Notre Dame? That’s the highest level, the most visible side of our faith in the country!’ And then he told me about other things in the Church. It was a rude awakening.”

Ralph Martin, as it happened, was the author of an 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. It was an alarm being sounded with increasing urgency by conservative Catholics who believed that the liberalizing reforms of the second Vatican Council, convened in 1962, had mutated into an assault on Church teaching and scriptural authority. There was, at the time, a widening gap in the Western Church between two fundamentally different views of the Christian faith, one oriented to a judgmental God and the promise of redemption, the other seeing God’s will at work in the pursuit of social justice. This divergence reflected the broader antagonisms that came to be known as “the culture war.”

“I just told him, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of different stuff going on in the Church these days,’ ” Martin recalled. “And some of it really is in harmony with two thousand years of Catholic tradition, and some of it isn’t.”

Until then, Monaghan had had an unambiguous sense of what it meant to be Catholic: “Whatever the Vatican says. That’s what it is. That’s the Tom Monaghan version. I’m with the magisterium. I’m with the Pope.” He had always assumed that this orthodoxy was shared by all professed Catholics. Otherwise, what was the point of being Catholic? Now that he understood that there was a struggle over the direction of the Church, and over his faith itself, he saw no option but to join in.

The divide that Martin described to Monaghan was nowhere more evident at the time than in Nicaragua, where the Church was at war with itself. Many local priests and laity had supported the Sandinista insurgency, and when the revolution succeeded, in 1979, some joined Daniel Ortega’s government. It was the zenith of liberation theology, which depicted Christ as a revolutionary and offered the mantle of Christianity to various leftist movements. Pope John Paul II firmly opposed liberation theology for its Marxist inclinations, as did the Church hierarchy in Nicaragua. Through much of his tenure, Ortega blamed the Church for encouraging the Contras, who were trying to overthrow his government; the Church, in turn, claimed that it was being persecuted by the Sandinistas. The struggle became a kind of proxy war between Catholic liberals and Catholic conservatives outside Nicaragua.

Ralph Martin considered liberation theology a peril to the Church. 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 Honduran village called El Mochito. Monaghan was so moved by the priest’s work with the poor that he purchased a pickup truck to replace Silvestre’s old mule and bought a generator for the hydroelectric plant that the priest was trying to build. It was his first significant foray into philanthropy. Other trips followed; travelling on the Domino’s jet, Monaghan found that Honduras was as close to Ann Arbor as Los Angeles was. He studied Spanish and started a sewing factory.

Honduras was also a staging ground for Nicaraguan Contras. Monaghan wholly endorsed their cause, although he says that he provided no direct, material support for their effort. “I was very aware of the situation in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, and how different it was from what the papers here were saying it was, and how the Church was persecuted,” he said. “And a lot of people I was working with in Honduras were Nicaraguans who’d crossed the border during that period.”

In 1990, a peace settlement was reached in Nicaragua, and in the elections that followed Ortega was defeated. Around that time, Monaghan received a call from Cardinal Bernard Law, of Boston, asking if he would donate to the construction of a new cathedral in Managua; it would replace the one that had been ruined by an earthquake in 1972, and would also be a visible symbol of the Church’s endurance. Monaghan agreed, but when he saw the design he found it lacking. “Ifyou’re going to build a cathedral, build a cathedral,” he recalls saying. The existing plans were dropped, and Monaghan brought in a Mexican architect, Ricardo Legorreta, who designed a $4.5-million cathedral, much of it funded by Monaghan. (He also gave a million dollars to a foundation connected to the Pope.) Monaghan was pleased with the result, a multi-domed concrete structure, but he notes that the design was controversial: “Some have said it looks like a woman’s breast.”

Monaghan was discovering that politics could be an effective, if sometimes controversial, means of advancing his religious agenda. He is a single-issue political partisan, and that issue is abortion. “All the others—whether we’re going to have a minimum wage, high taxes or low taxes—don’t matter,” he told me. “We’ve got to stop killing babies.”

In 1988, Michigan voters were considering a referendum that would have preserved state funding of abortion, which the state legislature had voted to end the year before. For pro-choice forces, it was an early attempt to use the referendum process to guarantee women’s access to abortion. Monaghan donated fifty thousand dollars to help fight the measure, and it lost by a considerable margin. The National Organization for Women called for a nationwide boycott of Domino’s, but Monaghan shrugged it off; although NOW maintains that it hurt the company, Monaghan told me that he thought the publicity might even have helped sales. (Monaghan’s fixedness on abortion prompted him, in December, to join the exploratory committee for what would be the long-shot Presidential campaign of Senator Sam Brownback, who is steadfastly pro-life.)

As Monaghan became more consumed by his work for the Church, he felt less driven in his job at Domino’s. By the end of the eighties, Domino’s had five thousand stores worldwide, and dominated the competition in deliveries. In 1989, Monaghan decided to step down as president and C.E.O., and to devote himself full time to his new calling.

By then, Monaghan was moving in élite orthodox Catholic circles, among men like George Weigel and Michael Novak, who were far more grounded than he was in the Catholic intellectual tradition; they knew Aquinas from Augustine, scholasticism from modernism, where Monaghan had a boys’-home catechism. But Monaghan was the ultimate autodidact. “If I get interested in a subject, I just smother it—I read everything I can read, I talk to the experts, I’m just obsessed,” he said. “That’s kind of the way I’m educated. I became, that way, probably more knowledgeable about the pizza business than anybody in the world.”

After meeting the young conservative scholar Dinesh D’Souza, Monaghan decided to read “The Catholic Classics,” two volumes of essays D’Souza had written on the great Catholic thinkers, from Bede to Pascal. One day, Monaghan was arrested by a passage from the work of the only Protestant writer whom D’Souza had included, C. S. Lewis. Lewis proposed that, in the scheme of Christian morality, pride—the sin of self-regard—was “the great sin.” He wrote 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.” A rich man’s striving for greater wealth, Lewis contended, was not greed but pride.

“That hit me right between the eyes,” Monaghan said. “C. S. Lewis told me that it was pure pride. You wanted to impress other people—impress them with a spectacular play, or you wanted to impress them with all your worldly goods and accomplishments.”

As he lay in bed that night, Monaghan said, he swore a “millionaire’s vow of poverty.’’ The next day, he began to dispossess himself of the earthly treasures he’d accumulated, beginning with his dream house, which was under construction in Ann Arbor. The house, designed by Fay Jones, a Wright protégé, had cost seven million dollars already; it sits unfinished in a field of weeds. Monaghan sold almost all of his Wright collection, some of it at a staggering loss. He had put thirty-five million dollars into building an island resort; he sold it for three million dollars. He gave up the helicopter, the Gulfstream, and the Bugatti. In 1992, he sold the Tigers to his pizza rival, Mike Ilitch, of Little Caesars.

“I had to get rich to see that being rich isn’t important,” he told me. “I was brought up poor, and I was embarrassed by my threadbare clothes and shoes. I had to get that out of my system. . . . It was a relief. I was getting too sidetracked by the quest for that stuff. I mean, it was a game. It was fun. You know, which new Gulfstream do you like? How much is it gonna cost? What do I have to do to get one?”

It helped that Monaghan’s wife, Marge, was resolutely unassuming; she’d never been particularly interested in the ostentatious adornments that her husband seemed compelled to acquire. Nor, for that matter, did she share his zeal for the faith. She was a Lutheran when she met Monaghan, and remains one still, despite receiving instruction from the Church before their marriage. (“It didn’t take,” Monaghan said.)

At the time, Domino’s was undergoing a financial crisis. It was burdened by debt, and had been overtaken by Pizza Hut, even in the delivery business. Monaghan believed that whenever Domino’s had faltered in its early years it was because he had ceded authority, and he was certain that was the problem now. He returned to the company in 1992, restructured its debt, and slashed jobs. By the end of the decade, Domino’s had rebounded.

In 1998, Monaghan sold the company for a billion dollars, and shortly thereafter he announced that he would devote the rest of his life, and his resources—after providing for his family—to the Church. “I want to die broke,” he declared.

Twenty miles northeast of Naples, Florida, heading inland and away from the Gulf of Mexico, is the Corkscrew Swamp, home to black bears, alligators, water moccasins, cuckoos, nesting storks, blue frogs, and the occasional Florida panther. Rising from a clearing near one leg of the swamp are the rolled-steel arches for the frame of a hundred-foot-tall cathedral. This is Ave Maria Oratory. Monaghan designed the cathedral, set on a plaza intended to evoke the piazzas of Padua. When it is finished, it will seat eleven hundred people and be the centerpiece of Ave Maria Town, the future home of Ave Maria University. If Monaghan goes broke before he dies, Ave Maria will likely be the reason.

Monaghan hadn’t meant to stake everything in Florida. After selling Domino’s, he placed two hundred and fifty million dollars in his foundation, which he had renamed the Ave Maria Foundation. In the mid-nineteen-nineties, he had funded a pair of startup elementary schools in Ann Arbor, but that approach was too small-bore for what he had in mind. A university could train young people who would, in turn, train the next generation of priests, teachers, nuns, and school principals. “You’ve got to create a sort of critical mass,” he said. “If we can get priests who are turned on to the faith, then you have a good congregation. It’s a multiplication. If you have a good principal, you have a good school. If you have a good catechism teacher, you have a good child. So you’re not catechizing one person, you’re catechizing thousands and thousands. And not just in one locality but all over the world. That’s why the university is such an efficient thing—a tool to change the world.”

There are already more than two hundred Catholic colleges and universities in the United States, but, in Monaghan’s view, though some are great universities, none are great Catholic universities. Notre Dame has become the sort of institution that stages “The Vagina Monologues.” The Jesuit-run University of San Francisco offers students a minor in gender and sexuality studies. Some schools, like Manhattanville College and Marist College, have surrendered their Catholic identity. Other Catholic schools, such as Franciscan University, in Steubenville, Ohio (of which Monaghan was the principal benefactor), and Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, California, were resolutely orthodox but had no ambitions to become first-tier research institutions. Monaghan was looking for a high-level academic institution that was also, as he puts it, “seriously Catholic.”

“What I wanted was something that wasn’t there,” he said. “And if it wasn’t there that means that I have to start it. That’s why we’re doing the university.’’

Monaghan founded Ave Maria College in 1998, in Ypsilanti, near Ann Arbor, using a former elementary school as its first campus. Not long after, he encountered a group of young law professors from the University of Detroit Mercy who were interested in building a new Catholic law school that would be wholly faithful to the teachings of the Church. Monaghan loved the idea; he had raised the possibility of doing something similar at Steubenville, but he found it hard to get things done there. He believed that sending devout Catholics into the world to practice law could only benefit the system; if some of them chose to take on the A.C.L.U. in First Amendment cases, or the pro-choice lobby on abortion, so much the better.

Monaghan called Bernard Dobranski, the dean of the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., with a proposal: Would he consider running such a law school? Dobranski had reason to decline. He’d been dean for three years, he had tenure and the promise of long sabbaticals, and he and his wife considered Washington to be home. He told Monaghan he’d consider it. The next day, Dobranski asked a friend, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to lunch. Dobranski remembers Scalia urging him to consider taking the job. The two men talked about how the new law school would need to get noticed, perhaps by making some high-profile hire. Dobranski named a few prominent scholars. “Ah, they’re just law professors,” Scalia replied. “You need somebody bigger than that.’’ Scalia suggested Robert Bork. Bork is an iconic figure to religious conservatives, who remember his bruising confirmation defeat as a Supreme Court nominee largely over the issue of abortion. After a call from Scalia, and a few meetings with Dobranski, Bork accepted a position as a professor.

Ave Maria School of Law opened in the fall of 2000, in a renovated laboratory facility in Ann Arbor, a couple of miles from Domino’s Farms. There was a crucifix in every classroom. When Monaghan addressed the first-year students, he urged them to attend Mass and to pray the Rosary daily. Those students graduated in 2003, and passed the Michigan bar at a rate of ninety-three per cent—the best in Michigan (prompting the National Review to congratulate the University of Michigan for having the second-best law school in Ann Arbor). Two Ave Maria graduates landed clerkships with prominent conservative judges, Samuel Alito and William Pryor. In 2005, the school received full accreditation from the American Bar Association, the fastest such clearance possible. Conservative Catholics suddenly had their own élite law school.

Monaghan wanted to make sure that neither the college nor the law school would lose its way ideologically, so he decided that they would not answer to a religious order, or to outside governors, but to a board that would be under his influence. He assumed the chairmanship of both schools’ boards, and he appointed the other members; his years in the business world had taught him that an agreeable board was vital. Members at the law school have included Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, Kate W. O’Beirne, the Washington editor of National Review, and former Representative Henry Hyde.

Monaghan hoped to move the college and the law school to the vast grounds at Domino’s Farms, an action that had to be approved by the Ann Arbor township. Approval was hardly a given; some of his earlier projects, such as a subdivision featuring homes designed by the thirty best architects in the world (chosen by a panel), had been stalled by the town. Now there was much local grumbling about a plan to erect a two-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall crucifix, bearing a forty-foot-tall Jesus, at the site of his proposed university. In April, 2002, the town denied Monaghan permission to build his university in Ann Arbor.

Monaghan began searching for another location, and while vacationing near Naples he decided that he had found it. That corner of Florida was at the height of a boom, and Monaghan was delighted to discover that the area was heavily Catholic. In addition, there was no major Catholic university like the one he proposed in the South; the closest élite universities were Duke, in Durham, North Carolina, and Emory, in Atlanta. He surveyed the region for a suitable property and made a hundred-million-dollar offer for a section of land in east Naples. The deal fell through, but something far more compelling presented itself. The Barron Collier Company, the major landdevelopment company in the area, proposed to give Monaghan the land to build his university; the company would then develop the property surrounding the university, selling home and commercial sites whose values would be enhanced by proximity to the school. Monaghan offered a hundred million dollars to be a partner in the development of the town, and a deal was struck.

The arrangement had a potentially spectacular bonus for the university. Monaghan has pledged his share of the profits to the school and, with real-estate values in Naples rising wildly, Ave Maria could very quickly become one of the best-endowed Catholic colleges in the country.

It wasn’t Bemidji, but Ave Maria Town represented something close to Monaghan’s ideal. He thought that such a place would become at least ninety per cent Catholic—who else would be interested in moving there? He also assumed that, since he and his partner, Barron Collier, controlled all of the commercial properties, they could make sure that the town’s businesses were in keeping with the character he wanted it to have.

Monaghan was surprised, last year, when his comments about keeping pornography and contraceptives out of his “Catholic town” caused such a fuss. Barron Collier was surprised, too. The company quickly offered assurances that all faiths would be welcome in the town. “It was never intended to be a restricted or Catholic-only community,” Paul Marinelli, Barron Collier’s president, said. “And we are not restricting the contraceptives. In deference to Tom’s request, and to the Catholic university, we’re requesting that contraceptives not be sold, but we’re not restricting. There’s a big difference.”

“I’m not going to break the law,” Monaghan told me. “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.”

But that controversy was a passing annoyance compared with the strife that the Florida project caused between Monaghan and his school communities in Michigan. At Ave Maria College, in Ypsilanti, students and faculty were outraged by the news that they would all be moving to Florida. From Monaghan’s perspective, the move posed an inconvenient, but certainly bearable, disruption; after all, Domino’s franchisees had often been obliged to relocate. That was not the view in Ypsilanti; lawsuits were filed, fraud was alleged, and Monaghan found himself being assailed in the journals and Web logs of the conservative Catholic wing—his own base.

He said that he would move those students and employees who were willing to go, and keep the Ypsilanti school operating until the last student currently enrolled had graduated. In the fall of 2003, Monaghan opened Ave Maria University at an interim campus in Naples, and there are now about four hundred undergraduates enrolled. The Ypsilanti college is in its final year, with an enrollment of three students.

The law school’s resistance has been more vexing. Its board of governors, chaired by Monaghan and filled with his appointees, has not yet voted to relocate the school. Among the dissidents are members of the founding faculty. Partly, this reflects a reluctance to uproot their successful, but fragile, institution, so carefully planted in cosmopolitan Ann Arbor. But the greater cause of disaffection is a sudden awakening to the level of control that Monaghan expects to have over the school (which has included setting a faculty dress code). “The board and Tom would like to make us irrelevant,” one law-school professor told me. “They would like to treat us as pieces of pizza, or pieces of equipment.”

Father Richard John Neuhaus, who serves on the Ave Maria University board of regents, is not certain that the conflict can be easily settled. “To build a great university, you need a great faculty, and academics do not want to be viewed simply as employees,” Neuhaus told me. “I don’t know how that’s going to be resolved. I think Tom is inclined to say, ‘This is my business. It’s called Ave Maria University, and they’re working for me.’ And that has some very powerful built-in tensions.”

What many Catholics have wanted from Monaghan is philanthropy of the Warren Buffett sort—that he give his money and then walk away, wishing his beneficiaries the best. Monaghan counters that the lessons he has learned as an entrepreneur are critical to the chances of a startup school like Ave Maria. “A lot of academicians will scoff at that thought, because they feel that academia is something unique unto itself,” he said. “They feel that business is something that’s much less noble.”

Monaghan had entered the field of higher education with his usual zeal, taking up the reading of The Chronicle of Higher Education and talking to university presidents around the country. They told him that the biggest problem in running a university is faculty tenure, which, among other things, insulates the professoriat from market forces. That confirmed Monaghan’s belief that a model based on the discipline of business was the right one for the Ave Maria schools. He has made it clear that the law school can move to Florida, where it will enjoy new facilities and a healthy endowment, or it can stay in Michigan, without his money.

“We’ve got high-powered people preparing briefs,” Father Joseph Fessio, the provost of the university and a member of the board of governors at the law school, said. “This is going to be bad, bad publicity.”

Given the uncertainty about its future, some potential students are understandably hesitant to commit to the school. Late last year, property values in Naples fell, threatening the economic basis for the project. Meanwhile, rising construction costs—owing to a building boom in China and to post-Katrina reconstruction on the Gulf Coast—have made the project more expensive than Monaghan imagined. He told me that his foundation did not have an endlessly open spigot. “That’s going to dry up,” he said. “I’ve got a real tough period between now and when the dividends start coming in from the town. That’s 2010. I’ve got a real squeeze between now and then.”

Monaghan’s undertaking in Florida, for all its entanglements, reflects the ambition of a man who is himself remarkably uncomplicated. It is difficult not to see Ave Maria as being of a piece with his purchase of the Detroit Tigers, or his Frank Lloyd Wright collection. Monaghan told me that his greatest ambition—“more than anything else in my life”—was to be “a good Catholic.” Daily Mass, praying the Rosary, were not enough. When Monaghan, who once pored over department-store dream books, decided to build a Catholic university, it had to be the best. It would have not just a campus chapel but a cathedral, and its crucifix would be the tallest in the world. “He is, in an emphatically non-pejorative way, a very simple man,” Neuhaus reflected. “Strikingly so. And sometimes you are almost taken aback by what appears to be a certain naïveté. But, you know, the saying of our Lord about being as ‘wise as serpents, and innocent as doves’ applies very nicely to Tom.”

Toward the end of our visit in Florida, I asked Monaghan whether his vision might have been better served if he had assumed a more passive role in his philanthropy. “It’s easy just to give your money and then continue to play golf, or whatever you do,” he said. “But I’m working harder than I worked when I had Domino’s. If people want to criticize that, fine. I’ll just get the job done. And I have this undeserved confidence that I can get the job done. I may be blessed with ignorance—but maybe that’s an advantage.” ♦