万花筒 Kaleidoscope2007-08-31&09-02, 天主教的乌托邦

Deep in the heart of south Florida along the hazy 1 swamps of the everglades, a brand new town is rising up from nothing. This is Ave Maria. A Catholic Utopia founded and funded by billionaire businessman Tom Monaghan. His ticket, he hopes to eternal salvation 2.

My goal is to get to Heaven and drag as many people along with me as I can.

Holy Mary, Mother of God.

Here streets are named after saints and popes. The town square built around a massive cathedral designed by Monaghan himself.

I think this will be one of the ten best known catholic churches in the country. The ten-year plan, 11,000 homes, 25,000 residents and 5,000 students at Ave Maria University.

Does it feel like Disney World for Catholics to you?

Well, I think it would be a place where, I think, a certain amount of Catholics, particularly serious Catholics would wanna live around a serious, really high quality Catholic university.

Monaghan has pumped nearly half a billion dollars of his personal fortune into Ave Maria, money he earned from the Domino's Pizza chain he founded and then sold nearly a decade ago. These are his glory years, his reward after a childhood of poverty and struggle, raised by nuns 3 in a Catholic orphanage 4 yearning 5 to give back his whole life, building his business around that goal.

You know the old saying: life is short and eternity 6 is forever, Domino's was just a... I always saw Domino's as a way to help the church. But wealth brought temptation, fancy cars, a baseball team, a fleet of private jets. Then one day while reading a book by the Christian 7 writer C.S. Lewis, Monaghan began to feel like a fraud.

I read this chapter in there called the Great Sin, and it's the sin of pride, worst of all sins. When you want to have more than other people have and accomplish more than other people have, that's a, it's, it's, that comparison to other people to be better than other people that...

So you sold everything off. Everything that was ostentatious. Yes.

The money is now going into Ave Maria which Monaghan insists is open to everyone not just Catholics.

What if somebody wanted to build a synagogue or a mosque 8 on the grounds here? (Fine. Fine.) Fine? (Sure.)

What if an atheist 9 wanted to move to town?

That's fine, too.

Maybe so but Monaghan prefers Ave Maria take its cues from the Vatican. In the past Monaghan has said cable TV here in Ave Maria would not be allowed to air adult programming like pornography. He's also said pharmacists wouldn't be distributing birth control, critics blasted him since then he's backed off. He realized he can ban condoms and porn at his private university but the law stops him from doing that in town.

I said some things that I didn't know I was talking about early on. You know, we are not gonna break the law, you know, I prefer not to have that sort of thing, that's something that my faith teaches as immoral 10.

So if a pharmacist decided 11 that he wanted to open up shop here and he wanted to sell contraception, would he be allowed to?

I don't think I would be able to do anything about it.

Even though you would want to?

I would, yeah, I would probably want to.

That might sound scary to some people, (Ready for your own room?) but to David and Marta Eysaman, it sounds like a wholesome 12 family environment.

Little bit of shelter, little bit of shelter from the crazy world. Not saying that influence might not get in here somehow, but I think it's going to be a lot more difficult for that to happen.

Proud new residents of Tom Monaghan's Kingdom of Heaven.