“Buying Things to Get Attention, to Have People Notice Me”
In our New Oxford Note, “Another Hurricane Hits Ave Maria University in Florida” (Feb. 2006), we noted that a Department Chairman was quitting Tom Monaghan’s Ave Maria University (AMU) to go elsewhere. He gave many reasons for his departure. One was: “AMU also misled us with respect to [Ave Maria] Town. The town, as you all know, will be Catholic only in name.”
Shortly after the February issue arrived in people’s mailboxes, stories broke that Ave Maria Town would indeed be a real Catholic town, not in name only. And we sure did hear about it from some of our readers!
According to an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal (Nov. 11, 2005), in a May 2004 speech, Tom Monaghan said: “We’ll own all commercial real estate. That means we will be able to control what goes on there. You won’t be able to buy a Playboy or Hustler magazine in Ave Maria Town. We’re going to control the cable television that comes in the area. There is not going to be any pornographic television in Ave Maria Town. If you go to the drug store and you want to buy the pill or condoms or contraception, you won’t be able to get that in Ave Maria Town.”
As for ourselves, we’d love to live in Ave Maria Town, if it is what Monaghan says it is.
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Given an absence of time for imagining alternatives, our humanity is defined in terms of consumption. We lack the peace needed to cultivate ourselves as unique persons.
Can we expect nuclear annihilation to pass us by while daily, in each major city of the U.S., hundreds of innocent human lives are systematically erased?
Well, we take our hats off, left-handedly, to Bishop Carlton Pearson.