When Monaghan was 4, his father died and his mother sent him and his brother off to a Catholic orphanage. From the time he was in second grade, he had ambitions of becoming a priest and entered a seminary, but he was rowdier than the other students. “At that time,” Monaghan recalls, “they had more seminarians than they knew what to do with.” Eventually, the seminary kicked him out.

Monaghan admits that his faith wavered at times in his young adulthood, when he served in the Marines and tried to save money to attend the University of Michigan. He eventually gave up his dream of going to school because of the cost. However, he and his brother were able to raise $500 and get a loan for $900 more to buy a pizzeria called DomiNick’s in Ypsilanti, Mich. He bought his brother out eight months later and the rest is history. That first pizza place turned into a franchise with 7,000 outlets and $4 billion in annual sales. Monaghan bought the Detroit Tigers baseball team, several Frank Lloyd Wright homes and he collected a large number of classic cars that he put on public display—along with his baseball memorabilia—in a museum at Domino’s Farms in Ann Arbor, Mich.

As his empire grew, so did Monaghan’s faith. “The point of my life is to be a good Catholic,” says Monaghan, who attends mass daily. As his pizza business made him wealthier, his contributions to conservative Catholic causes grew—and attracted notice. In 1989, he donated $60,000 to a campaign to restrict abortion in Michigan. The National Organization for Women asked sympathizers to consider boycotting the chain. Numerous owners of Domino’s stores, squeezed between the pieties of their franchiser and the politics of their customers, braced for the worst.

The NOW boycott persuaded Monaghan to sell Domino’s in 1998.

“I didn’t want to be vulnerable,” he recalls. He felt it was unfair to hold his franchisees and their employees hostage to his deeply rooted beliefs. Monaghan sold almost all of his interest in the company for $1 billion. He is now in the process of investing part of that money into causes that NOW would find no less objectionable, including a political action committee that supports antiabortion candidates.

He has used the bulk of his largesse, however, to establish a Catholic college intended to put Georgetown and Notre Dame to shame. Ave Maria University opened in 2003 on a temporary campus in Naples, Fla. Monaghan wants it to produce more priests and nuns than any other school. “There is no Catholic university in the country now that is true to the church,” he argues. “A lot of universities felt they had to bring in different viewpoints, a lot of dissident Catholics.”

Many progressives within the church see Ave Maria as an act of hubris. “Does Mr. Monaghan really think that there are no ‘truly Catholic’ universities?” wrote Richard P. McBrien, a priest and Notre Dame professor, in The Tidings, a Catholic weekly. “If you are going to give to the church, you are going to give to the bishop and let him decide to do with it what he thinks needs to be done,” adds Charles Irvin, a retired priest from eastern Michigan, Monaghan’s home base. While he is no Monaghan fan, Irvin acknowledges that certain worthwhile projects, such as a new Catholic high school in the area, would not exist without Monaghan’s gifts.

Monaghan insists this grousing is motivated by envy. “Every Catholic charity has been at my door,” he says. “No matter how much you give, you make a lot of enemies. If you do give, they want more and more, and it’s a bad thing when you give too much, because it comes too easily to them.”

Before starting the college in Florida, Monaghan had discovered that even those seeking to endow a university can find themselves embroiled in local disputes. In 1998, he had established Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti and the Ave Maria Law School in nearby Ann Arbor, with the intention of eventually expanding the two to create a full-scale university. When Monaghan ran up against the Ann Arbor zoning board, which denied his plans for expansion, he took $250 million and opened the university in Florida. The Ann Arbor law school may stay where it is or move to Florida, and the fate of the college in Ypsilanti is uncertain; there is talk that it will close. “The college has a board of its own and it will decide,” Monaghan says. But then again, he appointed the board’s members. He is also the chairman.

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