LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

thedemonprist pointed out this very interesting article to me. I didn't want to dissapear without comment into the aether uncommented upon, so it's featured here. It's about Tom Monaghan's "Ave Maria" project, a specifically Orthodox Catholic city being built in SW Florida. Some excerpts:

If Tom Monaghan knows this history, he doesn’t care. It’s a Saturday in March, and Monaghan — founder of Domino’s Pizza, former owner of the Detroit Tigers, and self-appointed savior of American Catholicism — is addressing an overflow crowd packed into BC High’s gymnasium for the first annual Boston Catholic Men’s Conference. Monaghan doesn’t seem like a revolutionary: his voice is gentle, his graying hair mussed, and he leans against the podium for support as he speaks. But his rhetoric is incendiary. Catholic schools are failing, Monaghan announces; on key issues (religious observance, sexual behavior, opposition to abortion), graduates of Catholic colleges and universities are actually less orthodox than their co-religionists who attend secular institutions. The problem is especially bad at elite schools, which are academically rigorous but spiritually impoverished. Yet Monaghan brings good news as well. At Ave Maria, the university he’s building in southwest Florida, things will be different. In a few years, the median SAT score will be higher than that at any other Catholic institution; even better, the dorms will be single-sex, a quarter of the classes will be taught by "wholly orthodox" priests, and students will be urged to become priests and nuns.

Bold talk — but the most dramatic part of Monaghan’s speech is yet to come. Ave Maria won’t be just a university, he continues. It will also be a new town, built from scratch, in which the wickedness of the world will be kept at bay. "We’ve already had about 3500 people inquire on our Web site about buying a home there — you know, they’re all Catholic," Monaghan says excitedly. "We’re going to control all the commercial real estate, so there’s not going to be any pornography sold in this town. We’re controlling the cable system. The pharmacies are not going to be able to sell condoms or dispense contraceptives." A private chapel will be located within walking distance of each home. At the stunning church in the center of town, Mass will be said hourly, seven days a week, from 6 a.m. on. "So," Monaghan concludes, with just a hint of understatement, "it’ll be a unique town." As he exits the stage, the applause is thunderous.

Right now, few people grasp the scope and significance of the Ave Maria project. Monaghan has been well known for years, and his forays into higher education — including Ave Maria University (temporarily located in Naples, Florida) and Ave Maria College and Law School (in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor, Michigan, for the time being) have received a fair amount of press. But the town of Ave Maria, which may become Monaghan’s most significant endeavor, has gone largely unnoticed. The earnest young usher who greeted me at BC High wasn’t aware of Monaghan’s urban plan; neither, until a few weeks ago, was Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

This may be by design. The town’s Web site, http://www.avemaria.com, minimizes its religious component, and Monaghan’s spokesman, Robert Falls, says it’s too early to discuss the way faith will shape life there. (Monaghan did not respond to several requests for comment for this story.)

Why the reticence? Maybe because the Ave Maria Tom Monaghan envisions — a Catholic hub in which opportunities for sin will be strictly circumscribed, and from which the truths of orthodox Catholicism will emanate throughout America and the wider world — may be illegal, and will certainly be controversial. If Monaghan’s dream comes true, Ave Maria will, in effect, become America’s first gated Catholic community. The decades-old efforts of American Catholics to assimilate will be reversed, and American religious pluralism will face a serious challenge.

What’s more, the ascension of Pope Benedict XVI has many conservative Catholics hopefully anticipating a smaller, purer, more obedient Church. If Ave Maria becomes a reality, it will become the American embodiment of this ideal — a combative bastion of orthodoxy in a sea of dissent and deviance.

In other words, the stakes are high. And the less scrutiny Monaghan’s utopian plan gets in its early stages, the more likely it is that it will come to pass.

This is very interesting, and disturbing. While Evangelicals and non demonimational Christians are taking over Colorado Springs, Monaghan is building his own religious utopia from scratch. And it isn't the only exclusive 'gated' Christian community, either.

There’s an obvious precedent for Monaghan’s endeavors. During the Cold War, some East European dissidents challenged the Soviet Union by creating a "parallel polis" — a network of institutions that would let them disengage from Communist society and live in relative freedom. For Monaghan, the enemy is the morally corroded secularism of modern America, and the freedom he seeks is the freedom to fully obey the moral teachings of the Catholic Church. Still, his method is strikingly similar.

The resemblance may not end there. Hundreds of years from now, dissenters like Václav Havel will be remembered for helping to foster communism’s demise. And Monaghan, as improbable as it may seem today, could be remembered as the man who helped transform America into a theocracy.

And how will the rest of the country- the secular outsiders- react to this place?

Even so, a number of troubling scenarios come to mind. What happens, for example, if an outspoken atheist tries to purchase a home in Ave Maria? If supporters of a political candidate who backs abortion rights attempt to canvass there, will they be turned away? If an individual or group of persons living inside Ave Maria deviate from Monaghan’s conception of Catholic orthodoxy — say, by possessing pornography or contraception — what will the consequences be?

Strange as it may sound, the best outcome for Monaghan and his supporters might be to see Ave Maria challenged in the courts. It is a commonplace, among conservative Christians of all stripes, that the judiciary and the broader culture are hostile to "people of faith." The acuteness of this conviction should not be underestimated. In 2000, for example, Father John McCloskey, another eminent Catholic conservative, wrote a widely noted letter framed as a communication, in 2030, from an elderly priest to a newly ordained youth. In McCloskey’s imagination, a vague but ominous conflict had replaced the United States with a "Regional States of North America"; the Catholic Church in the US had emerged stronger, but hardly unscathed. "As it turns out," the imaginary mentor tells his protégé, "those few years in prison and the torture were wonderful for my spiritual life."

If meddling secularists and activist judges intrude on Monaghan’s project, the collective ire of orthodox Catholics — who are already incensed by America’s embrace of the so-called culture of death — will only intensify. And those who share Monaghan’s worldview will have a new martyr. If the town of Ave Maria proceeds apace, meanwhile, the militantly separatist Catholic subculture that’s already growing in American society will be that much stronger. Either way, Tom Monaghan wins.