AmericanPapist Comments
The pizza king is actually a realist. After all he didn't become a successful businessman by not paying attention to trends. Every Catholic utopia has failed, even the Jesuit reduction in Paraguay. St. Paul in 1 Cor 5:9 tells the Corinthian Christians that when he said not to associate with the immoral of this world he did not mean those outside the Christian community, but those who had brought the pollution inside the Christian community. His punch line says it all, "Then, you would have to go out of the world." True Christians embrace the world as the locus of God's action, they do not shun it. Grace builds on nature and comes to our aid when living in a world that is inimical to what we believe. Any attempt at a Catholic utopia is fundamentally anti-Catholic. It is the kind of thing sectarians like the Branch Davidians do. Catholics affirm the world and the only time they make a fuga saeculi is to renew themselves so that they might re-enter the world and live their witnesss to the Gospel.
Ave Maria world and Ave Maria University will be a flash in the pan. What will the University have to do to get students? Absorb Christendom and Steubenville and therefore cause their demise. Do the numbers. There are not enough of the kinds of students Ave Maria needs to make it in the world. This is an experiment that is doomed to failure.
The negative comments about Tom Monaghan, his University and Ave Maria the Town, comming from Catholics is just bizarre. What the heck is the deal here? I'll paraphrase Mother Teresa again. God doesn't ask us to be successful. He asks us to be faithful.
The reason? Ecumenism? Realism? No, "It would be boring." Gotta love it, as much as everything else he has decided in the last few years.
The Holy Spirit doesn't crunch numbers very well, I'd imagine.
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