Building A Catholic Utopia

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Newsweek eyes Tom Monaghan’s Ave Maria University and the planned surrounding town with some alarm:

"For Tom Monaghan, the devout Catholic who founded Domino’s Pizza and is now bankrolling most of the initial $400 million cost of the project, Ave Maria is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to spreading his own strict interpretation of Catholicism. Though he says nonbelievers are welcome, Monaghan clearly wants the community to embody his conservative values. He controls all the commercial real estate in town (along with his developing partner, Barron Collier Cos.) and is asking pharmacies not to carry contraceptives. If forced to choose between two otherwise comparable drugstores, Barron Collier would favor the one that honored that request, says its president and CEO, Paul Marinelli.

[…]

"The ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] of Florida is worried about how he’s playing the game. ‘It is completely naive to think this first attempt [to restrict access to contraception] will be their last,’ says executive director Howard Simon. Armed with a 1946 Supreme Court opinion that ‘ownership [of a town] does not always mean absolute dominion,’ Simon will be watching Ave Maria for any signs of Monaghan’s request’s becoming a demand. Planned Parenthood is similarly alarmed. So far, Naples Community Hospital, which plans to open a clinic in Ave Maria Town, says it will not prescribe any birth control to students. Will others be able to get the pill? ‘For the general public, the answer is probably yes, but not definitely yes,’ says hospital point man Edgardo Tenreiro. The Florida attorney general’s office says the issue of limiting access will likely have to be worked out in court. Barron Collier and Monaghan say they’re following Florida law."

GET THE STORY.

(Nod to the reader who sent the link.)

So, unless contraceptives and abortion are available on every corner, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are going to be frightened that their constituents do not have "legitimate access"? For the sake of argument, let’s briefly set aside the question of the morality of contraceptives and abortion: Who says that everything a person could be expected to have access to must be in his hometown? Surely most people have recourse to cars and other forms of transportation to take them to the products and services they demand?

Unless, of course, they are poor, and the poor are the major customersprime targets of groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

7 thoughts on “Building A Catholic Utopia”

  1. I’ve never heard of Planned Promiscuity bothering any Mennonite communities, so why are they picking on us Catholics?

  2. “I’ve never heard of Planned Promiscuity bothering any Mennonite communities, so why are they picking on us Catholics?”
    Perhaps because the Mennonites are not a serious threat to their agenda.

  4. So lets get this straight. Busloads of serf are being forced at gun point to move to this fortress utopia where they are striped of all human rights and subjected to a brutal inquisition.
    By the way could “strict interpretation of Catholicism” be translated as orthodox?

  6. Could the ACLU possibly sue Borders and force them to open a store here in Ramona so that I don’t have to drive 20 miles down the hill for my paperback fix? After all, bookaholics have rights, too!

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