{"id":473,"date":"2009-05-12T13:17:15","date_gmt":"2009-05-12T13:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/ave-maria-expose.html"},"modified":"2009-05-12T13:17:15","modified_gmt":"2009-05-12T13:17:15","slug":"ave-maria-expose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/ave-maria-expose.html","title":{"rendered":"Ave Maria Town: Roman Catholic and…un-American?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ave<\/span>Ave Maria Town in southern Florida is the newly-constructed enclave of pure-land Catholicism founded and funded by former pizza magnate Tom Monaghan, and it has drawn its fair share of criticism<\/a> since construction began in 2005. Even many conservatives are uneasy with the throwback Catholicism that Mongahan wants to recreate in a soup-to-nuts, town-and-gown town that features a “traditional” university–but one that tried to fire the Ratzinger protege and blue-ribbon conservative, Jesuit Fr. Joe Fessio<\/a>. (Student and other protests led to his re-hiring.)<\/p>\n

Early reports were that Monaghan and his development partners would ban anything un-Catholic, like porn and cable TV–and non-Catholic residents–though those strictures were apparently overstated. <\/p>\n

Now, a well-reported and well-written investigative piece by the local paper, The Naples Daily News<\/em>, has uncovered a disturbing legal twist to Ave Maria–namely, that its own residents have no say in their own affairs because the five-member board will be controlled in perpetuity by Monaghan and the developer, Barron Collier:<\/p>\n

\n

When Kathy Delaney moved a year and a half ago with her two teenage sons from Maryland to Ave Maria, she believed certain rights remained unalienable.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Elections, she thought, followed the rule she’d known all her life: Her vote counted as much as anyone’s. Delaney could only assume the government of her new town operated the same.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I was even thinking, wouldn’t it be great,” Delaney said. “We could actually have our own mayor.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Actually, no. When Monaghan et al started the development on 11,000 acres of former farm fields they also wrote and lobbied for a state law–that passed–allowing them unique power to control the town forever through a five-member board on which they would always have a majority. As the story relates: <\/p>\n

\n

The law gives Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos. more power than any Florida developer in at least 24 years, power perhaps not seen since the days of the early 20th century land boom. The law makes landowners, not registered voters, the ultimate authority in Ave Maria. The law ensures Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos., as the largest landowners, can control Ave Maria’s government forever.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“I thought at some point we would be able to have a say in how the town ran,” Delaney said when approached by the Daily News and shown the government’s structure.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The series, “Ave Maria – A Town Without a Vote: Now and forever,”<\/a> ran in three parts, from Saturday to Monday, and it is the kind of in-depth reporting that I fear will disappear if (when?) newspapers do. <\/p>\n

Ave Maria also, unfortunately, feeds into the old stereotype that Catholics are more comfortable with divine right hierarchy than open democracy–that you can’t be a good American and a good Catholic. Yet as the series notes, Ave Maria may be in the American tradition of land barons more than it is in the Catholic tradition–at least of the past century, and especially under John Paul II–of holding up democracy as the political ideal, as long as it is accompanied by civic virtue. Maybe Monaghan doesn’t trust his own good Catholic residents?<\/p>\n

PS:<\/strong> Looking at photos in the series, I was struck for the first time–though I’ve seen it before–by the town church, crafted in the shape of a bishop’s mitre. I don’t know why, but this time it really bothered me, as if it is a church dedicated to the worship of a bishop. Yes, we have bishops good and bad, but none I know (I hope) would feel remtoely comfortable with that. Perhaps no coincidence that the local ordinary, Bishop Frank Dewane, had to postpone dedication of the church<\/a> due concerns over its canonical status and cooperation as part of the diocese. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}