A Town Planted in Faith

The founding and history of Ave Maria, Florida

It has been one of the characteristic features of Catholic civilization, in every age in which it has expressed itself with genuine creative force, that the impulse toward community and the impulse toward worship have been understood as a single impulse. The monastery that became a village, the village that grew around a shrine, the medieval town whose entire spatial logic was an argument in stone about the relationship between the sacred and the civic — all of these represent the same conviction, repeated across twelve centuries and a dozen cultures: that human beings cannot be fully human in isolation from God, and cannot be fully oriented toward God in isolation from one another. The sacred and the social are not two things. They are one thing, seen from different angles.

It is this ancient conviction, persisting with remarkable tenacity through the long disenchantment of the modern age, that found expression in an unusual place at the turn of the twenty-first century: twenty-three miles east of Naples, Florida, in the agricultural flatlands of Eastern Collier County, on land that had grown tomatoes within living memory and supported little else but the slow migrations of cattle between pasture and shade. Here, on this unpromising ground, a group of men decided to build a Catholic town.

The decision requires some historical context to be properly understood, for it did not arise in a vacuum. It arose from a specific moment in the long crisis of Catholic culture in America — a moment of both anxiety and aspiration, of loss and recovery, of the growing conviction among a certain generation of Catholic laymen that the post-conciliar dissolution of Catholic institutional life had gone far enough, and that the time had come to build something rather than simply to mourn what had been lost.

The Man and the Moment

The immediate human instrument of this founding was Thomas S. Monaghan, who had built a fortune in the pizza delivery business that he later sold, and who spent the subsequent decades deploying that fortune with the deliberate, sometimes eccentric energy of a man who believed that money was a stewardship and time was short. He had founded Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1998, and later Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor. Both were conceived as institutions committed to authentic Catholic intellectual life, alternatives to the drift toward secular accommodation that Monaghan saw in the Catholic university landscape of his era. When the opportunity arose to consolidate and expand these ventures on a new campus in Florida, he seized it with the urgency of a man who understood that institutions are fragile things and that the window for a particular kind of founding does not remain open indefinitely.

But Monaghan’s ambition extended beyond the university. He grasped — and this is what distinguishes the Ave Maria project from the merely academic — that a university cannot sustain a Catholic culture in isolation from the community that surrounds it. The great medieval universities had not been islands of learning surrounded by indifferent secular towns. They had grown from and with their communities, nourishing and being nourished by the parishes, the guilds, the families, the markets, and the rhythms of civic life that gave them their human substance. A Catholic university embedded in the generic secularism of twenty-first century American suburbia would face the same pressures that had eroded the Catholic identity of Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College, and the hundred other institutions whose original charters bore the marks of a Catholic vision and whose contemporary catalogs bore the marks of its dissolution.

What was needed, Monaghan concluded, was a town. A Catholic town — one built from the beginning with the same intentionality that the university itself embodied, designed so that the physical fabric of daily life would support and reinforce rather than undermine and dissolve the faith of those who chose to inhabit it.

In this ambition, whether Monaghan fully knew it or not, he was reaching back across the modern period to a tradition of Catholic community-building that the twentieth century had all but suppressed. The Catholic settlements of colonial Maryland, the intentional communities of various religious orders, the immigrant parishes that had functioned as total communities for successive waves of Catholic newcomers to American cities — all of these represented the same instinct: that faith is not a private matter conducted in isolation from the conditions of daily life, but a form of life that requires a form of community to sustain it.

The Land and Its Making

The land on which Ave Maria was to be built belonged to the Barron Collier Companies, one of the largest private landholders in Florida, whose family had been shaping the development of Southwest Florida since the 1920s. Barron Collier Companies made available to the Ave Maria University Foundation approximately 905 acres for the campus of the new university — a gift of land whose scale reflected the ambition of what was being undertaken. The surrounding town was to be built by Barron Collier Companies on adjacent acreage, in partnership with the university and under the governance of a specially created public body.

The enabling legislation — Chapter 2004-461 of the Laws of Florida, known as the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District Act — was passed by the Florida Legislature and signed into law in 2004. It created the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District as a special-purpose local government with authority over the infrastructure and services of the new town. The legislative findings that prefaced the Act described the project in language that is worth preserving in full, for it captures the official understanding of what was being attempted. The legislature found that Barron Collier Companies had made available the university land for “a private university with a full slate of undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs with related cultural, recreational, and other activities,” and that the surrounding new town community would be “university-oriented” — compact, balanced, mixed in use, human in scale, and designed to reduce automobile dependence and promote the kind of daily civic life that the planners had in mind.

The Rural Lands Stewardship Area program, under which the project was approved, had been designed precisely to encourage this kind of development — concentrated, coherent, and town-like — as an alternative to the low-density, land-consuming sprawl that had characterized most of Florida’s post-war growth. Ave Maria was to be, in the program’s own language, a demonstration that development in rural areas could be something other than the destruction of what made those areas worth inhabiting.

The Plan and the Vision

The Town Plan that was developed for Ave Maria is a document of unusual ambition and unusual specificity. Drafted by planners working in the New Urbanist tradition — a tradition that had spent three decades arguing, against the dominant logic of American suburban development, that the way we build forms the way we live — the plan describes a community oriented entirely around the human scale. Its streets were to be narrow, its sidewalks wide, its buildings positioned close to the street so that the pedestrian would experience not the vast setbacks and parking lots of the automobile suburb but the intimate enclosure of a genuine town. Shop owners were to live in residential units above their shops. University professors were to live within cycling distance of their classrooms. The daily commerce of getting groceries, attending Mass, visiting the library, and dropping children at school were all to be accomplishable on foot.

At the center of the plan, both spatially and spiritually, stood the church. The Town Plan refers to it as the Oratory — the great church of Ave Maria, modeled on the medieval period of the European cathedrals, placed at the head of Annunciation Circle (“Main Street”) as what the plan calls the “terminating vista”: the point toward which every element of the town’s principal street was directionally oriented. The language of the plan is, in this respect, the language of Christopher Dawson’s understanding of Christian culture: the architecture is the theology made visible, the spatial organization of the town is the expression of the community’s understanding of what it exists for. A town that ends its principal street at an altar is saying something about what it regards as highest. It is making a claim, in stone and in plan, about the ordering of human life.

The landscape design of the Town Core was to be, in the plan’s own words, “restrained, respectful and inspiring, a place where the bustling daily street life of a college town is the main event.” The phrase is revealing. The planners understood that a university town lives in its streets — in the chance encounter between professor and student, between shopkeeper and neighbor, between the old resident and the new family just arrived from Ohio or Virginia or California, drawn by the promise of something that the generically secular American landscape could not offer them. The street was to be the medium through which the Catholic community reproduced itself through daily contact, mutual recognition, and the accumulated weight of small shared experiences.

The Founding and the First Families

The university formally opened in 2007 in its new Florida location, and the surrounding town began to receive its first permanent residents in the same period. The families who came were, for the most part, precisely the kind of people the founders had imagined: men and women who had made a deliberate choice, often at considerable personal and financial cost, to build their lives in proximity to a Catholic university and within a community ordered toward the faith they practiced. They came from across the country. They brought their children and, in some cases, their aged parents. They secured jobs, volunteered in the schools, planted gardens, joined neighborhood associations, and began the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a community rather than merely an aggregation of co-located households.

The Ave Maria Catholic Church — placed in its position of honor at the head of Annunciation Circle, its tower visible from approaching roads and across the surrounding residential neighborhoods — passed from its initial status as a university chapel-oratory into diocesan ownership in 2017, coming under the pastoral care of the Diocese of Venice. This transition marked, in the life of the town, a significant moment of institutional maturation: the church was no longer primarily a university institution but a parish church, responsible for the spiritual care of the growing permanent population that had gathered around it. The building that the plan had designated the sacred center of the town became, in fact, the parish center of a living community.

The university itself, under the leadership of its successive presidents and sustained by Monaghan’s ongoing generosity and the generosity of Catholic donors across the country, developed into a genuine institution of Catholic intellectual life. Its faculty included serious scholars committed to the integration of faith and reason that the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes had described as the proper vocation of the Catholic university. Its students came, in disproportionate numbers, from the most devout Catholic families in America — families who had chosen, against the grain of the broader culture, to send their children to a school that would take their faith seriously as an intellectual commitment and not merely as a private consolation.

The combination of the university and the surrounding town produced, in its early years, something that was genuinely unusual in the American landscape: a community in which the rhythms of the liturgical calendar governed the public life of the place, in which the feast days of the Church occasioned communal celebration, in which the daily round of Mass and prayer and study and work and neighborhood conversation were integrated into a single coherent way of life. It was not a perfect community. No human community is. But it was, and in its best moments remains, a genuine attempt to incarnate in the material circumstances of twenty-first century Florida the ancient conviction that the sacred and the social are a single thing.

The Character of the Community

What is historically significant about Ave Maria is not merely that it was founded with Catholic intentions — many institutions have been so founded and have subsequently lost their founding character with remarkable speed — but that the founding intentions were inscribed in the physical fabric of the place in ways that gave them a degree of permanence that purely institutional commitments rarely achieve. The Town Plan’s requirement for human-scaled streets, mixed uses, and pedestrian orientation was not a pious aspiration but a legal document with binding specifications. The placement of the church at the head of Annunciation Circle was not a preference that could be later revised at a planning commission’s convenience but a fixed element of the town’s spatial structure, written into the fundamental plan of the community.

This physical inscription of value into the built environment is, as Dawson observed across the whole range of his historical writing, the characteristic achievement of a civilization in its creative period. The cathedrals of the high Middle Ages are not merely beautiful buildings; they are the permanent record of what a civilization believed about the relationship between matter and spirit, between the human and the divine, between the temporal city and the eternal one. They outlasted the specific political and economic conditions that produced them by centuries, and they continue to orient the communities that live in their shadow even when those communities have forgotten most of what the buildings were built to express. The physical form of Ave Maria — however imperfectly executed, however subsequently compromised by the pressures of the market and the imperatives of development — represents the same kind of permanent inscription. It was built around a church for a reason, and the reason is still legible in the structure of the streets.

The community that gathered around that structure was, and is, composed of people who represent one of the more significant demographic phenomena of contemporary American Catholicism: the emergence of a committed Catholic laity that has self-consciously rejected the assimilationist trajectory of their grandparents’ and parents’ generations and chosen, instead, a deliberate re-engagement with the full intellectual and cultural inheritance of the faith. These are not people who stumbled into Ave Maria because it was convenient or affordable. They are people who moved their families across the country, many of them, because they had made a considered judgment that the kind of Catholic life they wanted to live for themselves and to transmit to their children was more possible here than elsewhere. They constitute, in the precise sense of the term, a chosen community — chosen by its members, not merely inherited by them.

The Trial and the Present Moment

As with all human projects undertaken with high ambitions, the history of Ave Maria has not been without its trials and contradictions. The governance structure established by the 2004 Act placed effective control of the town’s development in the hands of its primary landowner — an arrangement that made practical sense in the early years of the project, when the developer’s commitment to and knowledge of the site was greater than that of any resident population, but that has become, as the community has matured, an increasingly problematic concentration of power. The Board of Supervisors of the Ave Maria Stewardship Community District, as of this writing, retains a landowner-majority composition, with three of its five seats elected by the one-acre, one-vote principle that gives Barron Collier Companies the dominant voice in decisions that directly affect the daily lives of thousands of resident families.

The development decisions made under this arrangement have not, in important respects, honored the founding vision. The garage-dominated subdivisions that have spread across the town’s expanding residential fabric represent a systematic departure from the Town Plan’s specification of pedestrian-oriented, human-scaled housing. The commercial development at Midtown Plaza represents a systematic departure from the plan’s vision of street-fronting, pedestrian-accessible commercial life. The absence of owner-occupancy requirements and lease-term limits has permitted the progressive concentration of residential units in investor hands, producing the transient tenant populations that are the structural enemies of the kind of rooted community membership that the founding vision required. And the June 2026 approval, over the unanimous opposition of every resident who spoke at the public hearing, of a further expansion adding 6,738 homes to the town’s authorized residential capacity represents a decision made by commissioners responding to the developer’s framing rather than the residents’ experience.

These developments constitute, for the historian of Catholic culture, a familiar pattern. The creative period of a civilization — the moment of founding, of high aspiration, of genuine spiritual energy given material form — is followed, almost invariably, by the period of consolidation and then by the period in which the institutional structures that were built to express and protect the original vision begin to be captured by forces that are indifferent or hostile to it. The question that history poses to every such community, at the point when this capture becomes visible, is whether the community retains enough understanding of and commitment to its founding vision to resist the capture — or whether it will acquiesce, gradually and without a decisive moment of surrender, to the dissolution of what made it worth building in the first place.

What the Historian Must Say

Dawson believed, and demonstrated across the whole range of his scholarly work, that cultures are not merely economic or political phenomena. They are spiritual organisms, animated by a vision of the sacred that gives them their form and their creative energy, and that passes through periods of vital expression, consolidation, decline, and sometimes — not always, but sometimes — renewal. The renewal, when it comes, does not come from above, from the great institutional powers that have accommodated themselves to the forces of dissolution. It comes from below, from the communities of ordinary people who have retained their connection to the founding vision and who refuse, against the grain of the prevailing culture, to surrender it.

Ave Maria is, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, at precisely this point of decision. Its founding vision is documented, specific, and recoverable. Its physical structure still bears the marks of that vision — most importantly in the position of Ave Maria Catholic Church at the head of Main Street, a fixed spatial argument that the highest thing in the common life of this place is not the market but the altar. Its community includes thousands of families who came here precisely because they took that argument seriously and wanted to build their lives in accordance with it. And it has, in the legal mechanisms of its governing statute, a path toward the resident majority on its governing board that would give the community’s members the institutional voice in their own governance that genuine subsidiarity requires.

Whether these resources are sufficient to recover and sustain the founding vision against the pressures now bearing upon it is a question that cannot be answered in advance. History does not guarantee outcomes. It records choices. The choice before the residents of Ave Maria — whether to engage in the patient, specific, organized, and spiritually grounded work of defending what was promised to them, or to acquiesce in the slow suburbanization of a place that was built to be something else entirely — is a choice that will be recorded, and that will determine whether this small experiment in Catholic community-building in the Florida flatlands becomes, in the long run, a chapter in the history of Catholic cultural renewal or a footnote in the history of Catholic cultural loss.

The stones of the church are still there. The plan is still in the records. The families are still in the streets. What happens next is up to them.

Published by the Ave Maria Heritage Society — in defense of Ave Maria’s Catholic culture and its founding vision as a family-friendly college town built on New Urbanist principles.