Latest Monaghan university opens in Nicaragua - Thomas Monaghan funds Ave Maria College of the Americas - Statistical Data Included

National Catholic Reporter, March 23, 2001 by Paul Jeffrey

Here in the coffee-clad hills of southern Nicaragua, pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan of Ann Arbor, Mich., has acquired a second-hand college as part of his campaign to spread conservative Catholic influence through education.

An extension of Monaghan's Ave Maria University in Ypsilanti, Mich., Ave Maria College of the Americas is a small place. The school in Nicaragua hopes to attract just 600 students within two years. As the latest in the chain of schools being developed by a man who made millions creating a chain of Domino's pizza parlors, however, its importance could reach far beyond this sleepy Central American town an hour south of Managua.

Yet the new Ave Maria College must overcome daunting challenges if it is going to turn out dedicated troops of the Catholic right. On one level, the story of the school is another chapter in the conservative Catholic education empire Monaghan is attempting to build. At the same time, it is just as much a story of post-revolution Nicaragua, where the absolute lines of conflict become blurred and where, amid deep poverty, a successful U.S. entrepreneur is trying to implant U.S.-style Catholic higher education with a U.S.-style price tag.

Those running this campus today aren't the first to mount a religiously inspired college here. Before Monaghan and the Catholics took it over, this was a branch campus of the University of Mobile, a Baptist school sponsored by the Alabama Baptist Convention. University of Mobile officials arrived in Nicaragua after the electoral fall of the leftist Sandinistas and started holding classes in 1993. They awarded an honorary doctorate to Violeta Chamorro, then president of Nicaragua, who reciprocated by giving the school the abandoned buildings of what had once been a teachers' college for young women.

By the end of the decade, however, the operation was in dire straits. Serious financial mismanagement of the university campus by administrators created a fiscal black hole that Alabama's Baptists could no longer accept. In early 1999, they pulled out.

A group of wealthy Nicaraguan Catholics saw opportunity where others saw crisis. Led by Humberto Belli, a militantly anti-Sandinista activist who served as minister of education under Chamorro, they went shopping in the United States for an institution to adopt the school. The project got a serious look from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, a Catholic college that proudly displays its conservative credentials (see NCR, Sept. 11, 1998), where Belli had taught sociology for four years. But that association came to naught. Many in San Marcos expected the school to close.

In a last-ditch reprieve, Jesuit Fr. Joseph Fessio, president of Ignatius Press in San Francisco, called Monaghan and told him about the school's plight. Monaghan, who had earlier funded a cathedral in Nicaragua, readily handed over $1 million to keep the school running, plus $400,000 to pay off some outstanding debts.

It was a short-term solution, but after Monaghan himself came to take a look at the college in May 1999, it got a sponsor. Ave Maria College of the Americas was adopted by Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, which Monaghan had established the previous year.

School officials say a substantial subsidy will be needed from Monaghan for at least three more years.

Belli gold NCR that Monaghan will soon provide funds for an additional project in Nicaragua, but he refused to elaborate.

Monaghan is no stranger to funding Catholic projects.

His ventures into Catholic education include a network of Spiritus Sanctus Catholic elementary schools, five so far, including two in Honduras, and a conservative Catholic law school founded in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1999, with $50 million from Monaghan. Deeply concerned about what he describes as a crisis of morality, Monaghan envisions his Ave Maria Law School as a "West Point for Catholicism and the law," an undisguised slap at what he sees as lax standards at other Catholic law schools. "He is founder of Legatus, an organization of Catholics who are chief executives of corporations, and of the Thomas More Center for Law and Justice, a public interest law firm that handles religious freedom cases and is committed to outlawing abortion. He owns a Catholic radio station and newspaper.

He helped fund Catholic Family Radio, a network of stations that got at least verbal boosts from Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver, Nicholas Healy, former vice president of Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and Fessio of the conservative St. Ignatius Press. They are names that show up regularly together on projects, key components of a loose network of institutions, academicians, philanthropists and church leaders known to advance conservative Catholic causes.

Monaghan, further, has been a staunch proponent of the provisions of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the church document governing Catholic higher education and containing the highly controversial rule requiring theologians teaching at Catholic colleges to obtain a mandatum, or permission to teach, from the local bishop. At one point during the extended debate over the subject, Monaghan underwrote a project to send to every U.S. bishop copies of talks from a seminar in which speakers advocated the new document.