My Goal is to Help as Many People as Possible Get to Heaven

In a rural pocket of Collier County, 5,000 acres of citrus, sod, pepper and tomato farms have been transformed into Tom Monaghan's field of dreams.

The property, some 23 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, will be the site of Ave Maria University, the nation's first new Catholic university in 40 years. Adjoining it will be the planned community of Ave Maria, where the population is projected to eventually reach 27,000. Both are slated to open next year.

Monaghan, 69, the Domino's Pizza magnate and former owner of the Detroit Tigers, is plowing much of his personal fortune into the projects, which, in various ways, will reflect his vision, hopes and beliefs. "I want this university to be one of the finest in the world, both academically and spiritually," Monaghan says. "That's aiming high. I can't do it in my lifetime, but I can build the foundation for it. I can put everything I have into it, both my money and my time. By the time we get through to the first phase on this new campus, I'm going to be pretty well broke. I mean, I'm not going to starve, but I won't be rich by any stretch of the imagination. And that's fine. What I'm hoping is that other people will like what we're doing and support it and help take it to the next level."

Monaghan is sitting in his modest north Naples office, at Ave Maria University's 12-acre interim campus next to the Vineyards. The Michigan native spends three weeks a month now in Naples, where he lives in a relatively modest "tear-down" house on Vanderbilt Beach. When his wife isn't in town, he says, he often stays overnight here on campus in a dormitory. "Modest" is a word often used to describe Monaghan, who is reserved, thoughtful and soft-spoken. But no one would call his ambitions modest.

"My goal is to help as many people as possible get to heaven," he says. "Intellectually, I know that no goal can be higher than that one. This is my way of trying to do it."

Tom Monaghan's metamorphosis from pizza mogul to the founder of a university and a town is not as unlikely as it may seem. Monaghan spent a lot of his childhood in foster homes and a Catholic orphanage and says he wanted to be a priest by the time he was in second grade. "I always felt that the most important thing in my life was to be a good Catholic. But I would always seem to fall short. I'd think, 'I'm going to get around to it.' As the years went by, I think I became better with my faith. I hope I have some time left because I still have a lot to do."

When he sold Domino's in 1998 for about $1 billion, Monaghan said he was going to use much of the money-"God's money," he called it-to help people get to heaven. The idea that he would do so by creating a Catholic university came to him "gradually," he says, during the years he ran Domino's. In fact, in some ways, Monaghan has been on the same road all of his life, even if its specific destination is only now becoming clear.

"A lot of my stores in the old days were in college towns, and a lot of students worked for me," he says. "Of course, I was living in Ann Arbor, also, where you have one of the largest concentrations of students just about anywhere. So I was very acclimated to an academic environment. I developed some ideas about how higher education ought to be done and finally decided to do it all in one school."

Monaghan is a college dropout who served three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, a stint he credits with giving him a sense of discipline. In 1960, he and his brother Jim bought a pizza business called Dominick's in Ypsilanti, Mich. His brother soon traded his half for their delivery car and Monaghan became the sole owner. He renamed the business Domino's and pioneered the concept of pizza delivery.

Monaghan often worked 14-hour days, seven days a week building Domino's. By the 1970s, there were more than 200 stores in the country. In 1985, sales reportedly topped $1 billion.

His faith helped him succeed, he says. "But it wasn't always what it should have been. It's been a long process." In 1973, he began attending daily Mass, which he calls "an important step, spiritually . I started doing it because I'd read that Don Shula went to Mass every day, and he'd just had the perfect season with the Dolphins. And I thought, 'Gee, if he's got the time to do that, why can't I?' Another big step was a year or two later when at one of the daily Masses the priest gave a homily about the importance of saying the rosary. So I started doing it every day, and I've been doing it ever since."

Still, he questioned whether his faith was strong enough. "I worked long hours. I worked years without vacations. I'd take off four days a year, year after year. I lived without things. I lived in a house trailer. I bought a house without furniture. And I'd think, 'That's good, you're looking ahead, you're not collecting things like other people.' But, in truth, it was just a way of saying, 'I have less now, so I can have more later.'"

The revelation came to him one evening in 1989 while he was reading C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity. The chapter on pride, entitled "The Great Sin," changed his life, he says. "It had a very dramatic effect because it was talking to me. I had started making money about 1980. Before that, I was always in debt. After having struggled for so many years and then all of a sudden hitting it big, I kind of got caught up in collecting things. Cars, buildings, yachts. And C.S. Lewis said, 'You're just doing this because you want to impress people.' And that hit me right between the eyes. It changed me overnight. It was something I didn't like to admit, but he said it so well. And I hate braggarts, but I really was one myself. I thought, 'Why am I working this hard? Why did I do this all these years? Why did I go without things? So I could have more later. More of what? More than others.' I remember being awake all night, thinking about it."

Monaghan was building a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired mansion at the time. He halted construction the next day. Then he sold off his antique cars. "I stopped everything overnight and said I was going to live differently. I didn't give up luxury, but I gave up ostentatious things. I can't live like a monk. I'm married and have children. But I looked at things differently."

In 1992, he sold the Detroit Tigers for $85 million. Increasingly, he gave to Catholic causes. Several years earlier, he had started Legatus, an organization of Catholic business leaders; it now has 2,100 members.

Among the projects he funded in the 1990s were a Catholic cathedral in Nicaragua and several Catholic schools in Central America. In 1998, Monaghan founded Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan, which he hoped to build into a university. Two years later, the Ave Maria School of Law opened in Ann Arbor. In addition, he founded the Thomas More Law Center, a public interest, nonprofit law firm that works on legal cases around the country supporting Christian causes.

After selling Domino's, Monaghan's plan was to build a Catholic university in Ann Arbor. But in early 2002, the Ann Arbor Township turned him down. "We'd had our battles with the township. It's a very low-growth region and very liberal. I've been a Republican throughout my adult life. I'm very pro-life. This was just another battle, and we lost."

For several years, Monaghan and his family had visited Naples, spending Christmas week at the Ritz-Carlton.

Four years ago, he says, "I got the idea that Naples would be the ideal place for the university. It just seemed right. It has the weather. It has a certain image, which will be ideal for attracting students, faculty and lecturers. And there's also no other Catholic university or college in this part of Florida. It's a very underserved area."

Also, it has a favorable political climate. "We've felt very welcome here," he says.

At first, Monaghan planned to build the university at a site in north Naples. But as he was about to purchase a parcel of land, an eagle was spotted on the property, jeopardizing his plans. "If the eagle had a nest there, it would have made it impossible, because by law you can't build anything within 1,500 feet of the nest. So we asked for a week's delay while we checked it out.

"It was during that week that we got the call from Paul Marinelli [of the Barron Collier Companies]. He said, 'I'll give you all the land you need to build a campus, and we'd like to build a town around it.'