Flower

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

Dawson James

2006/04 GulfShore Life Magazine

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.

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