More on the Ave Maria University

The Holy Virgin has given a gift to the People of Rome especially those in the Americas and in particularly the diocese of Venice. Ave Maria Univeristy will flourish until the end of time teaching to scholars what is the Truth through faith and reason. It is most surely God’s Holy Will that providence brings to us a saving university for the People of Rome. In God’s time it will be complete and is a pleasing sacrifice to Hime. May God richly bless this community of scholars in the Faith with fortitude, counsel, justice, and temperence in all things good. PAX ET BONUM.

I don’t see how a traditional capitalist such as Tom Monaghan could possibly give birth to an institution which generates many new priests and nuns. There are plenty of conservative Catholic institutions in the United States. The need to start a new one can only be explained with reference to the pride of Mr Monaghan. As he has said, he intends to die poor and has joked that starting a University will help him do so. I think there’s more truth in that statement than Mr. Monaghan cares to acknowledge.

God has made Tom Monaghan a very rich person perhaps for the purpose of demonstrating clearly the inability of riches to change the world.

Neither the world nor the Catholic church nor even Christians in general need another Catholic University at this time. What is needed is a new set of ideas to deal with all of the issues that make us ineffective. Or better, the application of some existing excellent ideas.

There are 3 main problems with the Catholic church today and none of them will be addressed by Monaghan’s folly:

1) Reconciliation with Protestant churches. If you are a Catholic and you believe that the will of Jesus Christ is being done in actively addressing this issue, you are a blind fool. When Thomas Aquinas set about reconciling not only the thought of Aristotle and Augustine but that of many other excellent thinkers, his task was monumental in comparison to the very paultry conceptual differences that separate Rome from her Christian brothers and sisters. We have all of the conceptual resources we need to forge a reconciliation but do to extreme mismanagement, pride and sloth, we have made little to no progress on this issue since the day Luther nailed his demands on the church door. Will Tom Monaghan’s money be the secret weapon to resolve this issue? How could it be since the immediate impact of starting a new university is to detract resources from the many ideologically similar institutions which already exist. And for those Cathoics who do not share Monaghan’s rigid Cathlolicism, they might as well be Protestant institutions. All of you crazies who think the church must detract before it can expand, should make your fair contribution to the cause by jumping off the nearest cliff.

As Catholics, we are called to promote our religion, to be instruments of conversion. How can we possibly convert Muslims or Atheists when we can’t even resolve our differences with Protestants? If you are a Catholic who is content with this state of affairs, you are a complete jackass and moron and you need to take a good long look at yourself in the mirror. Wake up!

2) Reconciliation and appropriation of other religions and philosophies. All of the conservative Catholics I’ve spoken to on this issue tend to believe that efforts to establish clear relatinoships to other religions are tantamount to adopting them or accepting their conclusions as truths. This belief is foolishness because as Aquinas and Aristotle before him point out so clearly, the act of distinguishing beliefs is the first step to accomodating and appropriating them….and establishing peace with the people who currently believe them. Of the liberal Catholics and non-Catholics I’ve spoken to on this matter, most have concluded that all ideas are competing for the same small intellectual space in everyone’s mind. They therefore reject all differences or distinctions among ideas. There is no pain greater than to sit between equally stupid conservative and liberal catholics and listen to them ramble about issues they’ve done nothing to try and understand.

3) Management of Resources. There are over 1 billion Catholics. That’s alot of spiritual resources. Why is it that in my 32 yrs of life, I’ve never once been involved in a unified effort to resolve any single issue as an entire body of Christ? Why can’t our Catholic leaders such as our present Pope issue very simple guidelines for ordinary Catholics to tackle such issues as abortion? Specifically, if there are so many lives being wasted everyday in abortions and if this is the scourge of our day, then why aren’t we all praying for it every single day and at every single mass–together, as a unified body? All we seem to get is lip service on Pro Life day or whatever it’s called. You talk about spiritual warfare but where is the war planning? When armies go to war, they know exactly how much fuel, engineers, gauze tape and batteries they need to invade. It’s call project planning. Everyone knows what the goal is—-the trouble is with the means to the end and that’s a function of planning. Nothing in the Catholic church is planned except for the brilliant photo OPs of the Pope instructing Americans about war. Why not start planning how we’re going to solve the abortion issue and giving ordinary catholics some leadership and confidence that everyday someone is planning and thinking about how best not to waste our Billion People Resource machine?????

With regard to another specific example, how poorly managed was the priest sex scandal? Honestly, I don’t know which to fear most–the sexual sins of so many priests or the inability of the catholic leadership to respond and resolve quickly the crisis. How weak is our Church if the leaders who are supposed to be protecting the message of Christ are unable to (a) rapidly and fully apologize for the sins of it’s priests, (b) urge all catholics to pray for the issue and (c) set up committees composed in part of victims to create processes and oversights to prevent it from happening again????? It’s simple. But it calls of leadership and the Catholic church has none!! If it did, we wouldnt have the folly of Tom Monaghan’s University.

In fact, I refuse to dignify his university with the name Ave Maria. Until something drastic changes with the whole venture, I will call it simply, Tom Monaghan University. And let me be the first to point out that universities founded on tired old ideas are tired and old before they break ground.

Monaghan has said the goal of his university is to churn out more new priests and nuns than any institution in the world. I see nothing new in his venture which will ensure anything but that mostly zombies and ineffective people will come out of that university. NOTHING NEW TOM MONAGHAN!!