On the right of Catholic residents to a Catholic town — and the duty to stand up and fight for the one we were promised
There is a moment near dusk when Annunciation Circle gathers itself toward a single point. The shops fall away, the green opens, and the eye is carried — whether the walker intends it or not — to the great church standing at the head of the town. The plan that built Ave Maria calls this the terminating vista, and it is no accident of drafting. A town that ends its principal street at an altar is making an argument before a single word is spoken. It is saying that the highest thing in the common life of this place is not commerce, not traffic, not the convenience of those passing through, but worship — and the form of life that flows from it.
This raises a question older than zoning, older than Florida, older than the corporation that owns the land around us. It is the question Aristotle asked at the opening of the Politics, and it is the question every resident of Ave Maria is entitled to ask of those who shape our streets: What is a town for?
The answer Barron Collier Companies now gives us — by the logic of its decisions, if not in so many words — is that a town is a product. An inventory of doors to be sold or leased to whoever bids. A yield to be maximized. A brand to be extended. We mean to argue something different, and we mean to argue it without apology: that a town is a form of common life ordered to an end, that the residents who have planted their lives here have a genuine right to defend the character of that life, and that to do so — lawfully, charitably, but without flinching — is not parochial narrowness. It is one of the oldest and most honorable acts of citizenship there is.
The city is the soul, written large
The Greeks did not think of a city as a neutral container into which lives were poured. They thought of it as a koinonia — a partnership, a sharing in something held in common. Aristotle held that the city comes into being for the sake of mere life but exists for the sake of the good life: it is the setting in which human beings become what they are meant to be, or fail to. Only within an ordered common life can a person grow into the virtues that a household alone cannot teach.
Plato put the same intuition more daringly. The city, he said, is the soul written in larger letters — easier to read because it is bigger. The arrangement of a place, its proportions and its honors, its public spaces and the things it elevates, forms the people who live within it as surely as a discipline forms a student. We become, in part, the shape of the streets we walk.
If this is true — and the experience of everyone who has ever loved a place and been changed by it suggests that it is — then the character of a town is never a private matter for its owners alone. It is a public good and a public trust. To say “the developer may make of this place whatever sells” is to say that the soul of a town may be sold by the square foot. The Greeks would have found that not merely imprudent but a kind of impiety.
A right rooted in subsidiarity
The Church gave this ancient intuition a name and a structure. The principle of subsidiarity, set down by Pius XI in 1931, holds that larger and more distant powers exist to help the smaller and nearer ones flourish, never to absorb or hollow them out. A great institution that strips a community of the decisions proper to it does not serve the common good; it commits, in the words of that teaching, an injustice and a disturbance of right order.
Catholic social teaching has always insisted that between the lone individual and the vast institution there must live a whole world of smaller communities — the family first of all, “the first and vital cell of society,” and then the parish, the neighborhood, the town. Leo XIII defended the natural right of these associations to bind themselves together for common ends. A century later, John Paul II named what he called the subjectivity of society: the right of a people to be the authors of their own common life, and not merely the consumers of decisions made above their heads.
A people has the right to give its common life a moral and spiritual form. To defend that form is not to exclude the stranger; it is to have something worth welcoming him into.
From this it follows — plainly, and without need of special pleading — that the Catholic residents of a town founded as a Catholic town have a right to its Catholic character. Not a right to compel belief, which the Church herself forbids. Not a right to bar any neighbor from living among us, which the law rightly forbids and charity forbids more deeply still. But a right to cultivate, to advocate, to build, and yes — to resist the dissolution of the very thing that drew so many families across the country to plant their lives here. A right to insist that our town remain ordered to the end for which it was conceived. That is the most ordinary thing a people can ask. It is exactly what subsidiarity exists to protect, and it is exactly what is now under quiet, profitable assault.
The humane scale, and what is being traded away
The economist Wilhelm Röpke spent his life warning against what he called the cult of the colossal — the modern habit of mistaking scale for progress, of dissolving the proportioned and the personal into something vast, anonymous, and ultimately inhuman. Röpke was no enemy of the market; he was its friend precisely because he wanted it kept in its place, embedded within a moral order and a settled community, serving human ends rather than devouring them. He believed property should be widely held rather than concentrated, that decisions should be made close to the people they affect, and that a healthy society needs many small owners with a permanent stake in their place — not a population of tenants paying rent to distant balance sheets.
This is the same conviction that animates the New Urbanist tradition out of which Ave Maria was drawn on paper. That tradition holds that the way we build forms the way we live: that walkable streets and a true town center and a fabric of mixed uses produce encounter, friendship, and belonging, while the gated subdivision and the arterial-road strip produce isolation and the automobile dependence that quietly starves a community of its public life. The founding plan understood this perfectly. It set the daily street life of a college town as, in its own words, “the main event.” It promised a place built to the human scale, where one could live and work and worship within a short walk, where shopkeepers might live above their shops and professors within cycling distance of their classrooms.
Beauty belongs to this argument, not as decoration but as substance. A town that is charming, that is built with care and proportion, that rewards the eye and slows the step, performs a work of charity on everyone who passes through it. Its beauty is held in common; no one is charged admission. The terminating vista, the arcaded sidewalk, the planted street, the human-scaled façade — these are not amenities to be value-engineered away when a quarterly target presses. They are the visible body of the common good. And they are precisely what is now being traded away.
Membership, affection, and the engine of transience
Wendell Berry has spent half a century describing the difference between two kinds of people: those who arrive at a place to take what can be taken and move on, and those who stay — who marry themselves to a place, learn it, mend it, and hand it on better than they found it. The first he calls boomers; the second, stickers. The health of any community depends on the proportion between them, and on whether its institutions reward fidelity or merely extract from it.
Berry’s word for what binds a true community is membership: not membership purchased or contracted, but the deep mutual belonging of people who have cast their lot together. And the engine of membership, he insists, is affection — the love of a particular place and particular neighbors, which alone can move us to protect what self-interest never will. You will not preserve what you do not love, and you cannot love an abstraction. You can only love this street, this parish, this view down to the church at dusk.
Here is where the developer’s choices do their deepest damage. When homes are bought in bulk by investors who will never live in them, when a growing share of the town becomes transient rentals occupied for a season and then turned over, when subdivisions are gated against the very streets they sit upon, the connective tissue of membership dissolves. The neighbor becomes a stranger who leaves before you learn his name. Affection has nothing to attach to. A town full of people with no permanent stake in it is not a community with a high vacancy of the heart; it is, structurally, the absence of community — however full the parking lots may be. And this condition does not arrive by accident. It is the predictable result of decisions made by people who are paid the same whether you ever know your neighbor’s name or not.
The witness of the Amish and the Hasidim
Some will say that to want a town with a distinct religious culture is, in twenty-first-century America, a strange or even a suspect ambition. It is neither. It is among the most respected things a community can do, and our law and our better instincts have long recognized it.
Consider the Amish, who maintain a way of life of astonishing coherence — agrarian, communal, ordered to faith — not by excluding their neighbors but by the gravitational force of their own institutions, their schools, their habits of mutual aid, their refusal to let convenience erode what they hold sacred. The Supreme Court itself recognized that a community’s right to transmit its faith and form of life to its children could outweigh even the ordinary demands of the state. Consider the Hasidic Jews of certain towns in New York, who have built whole municipalities suffused with their religious calendar, their language, their schools and customs — and who are admired, by anyone honest, for the seriousness with which they hand their inheritance on.
These communities teach us two things at once, and we must hold both. The first is permission: a thick, demanding, openly religious culture rooted in a particular place is not a violation of pluralism but one of its finest fruits. A society generous enough to make room for the Amish and the Satmar has room for a Catholic college town, and anyone who would deny us what those communities are rightly granted is not defending tolerance but practicing a double standard.
The second lesson is discipline. These communities sustain themselves through cohesion and witness, not through coercion of the stranger. They are formed from within, and their strength is the depth of their own common life, which draws others toward it rather than walling others out. That is our model exactly. We do not seek a town closed against our non-Catholic neighbors — who are welcome here, who are our friends, and whom the Gospel commands us to love as ourselves. We seek a town with a soul, and a soul is something you offer, not something you impose. What we defend is the form of the place: its founding orientation toward the altar at the head of the street. A culture confident enough to welcome the stranger is a culture worth keeping. That confidence is what we mean to build — and what no developer has the right to strip from us.
The vision that was promised — and the developer that is breaking it
All of this would be merely a fine sentiment were it not for a hard and documented fact: Ave Maria was not sold to its residents as an ordinary suburb. It was conceived and designed as something rarer — a self-sustaining university town built around a great church, on the human scale, where people would live and work and study and pray within the same walkable fabric. The town’s own founding plan, and the very act of the Florida Legislature that brought its governing district into being, describe a university-oriented new town community, supported by a balance of residential and non-residential life, with much of the town’s employment drawn from within. That was the promise. That is the vision to which the families who came here are entitled.
Look at what is actually before us. A new resolution that will increase the town’s dwelling units by some sixty percent. A deviation creating multi-family parcels large enough for sprawling apartment complexes. Strip malls away from the heart of the town. And, tellingly, no requirement of owner-occupancy and no limit on lease terms — nothing whatsoever to protect the town against the investor-owned, transient-tenant future that hollows out a community while filling a developer’s ledger. This is not the failure of the founding vision. It is the deliberate abandonment of it, decision by decision, for money.
And the residents have been spectators to it. Barron Collier holds the controlling votes on the board that governs our common life — three seats to the residents’ two — which means that the people who live here, raise their children here, and will grow old here have had, by design, the smaller voice in what becomes of their own home. That arrangement was tolerable while the developer kept faith with the vision. It is intolerable now that it does not.
A self-sustaining Catholic college town and a transient bedroom suburb for the commuters of Broward and Miami are not two flavors of the same place. They are opposites. And we can tell the difference.
A call to the Catholic residents of Ave Maria
So let it be said plainly, because saying it plainly is itself a service. It is right to want a predominantly Catholic town with a Catholic culture, and it is right to say so out loud. It is right to advocate for it — in print, in public meetings, before every body that governs our common life. It is right to resist, lawfully and resolutely, the measures that would dilute the heritage and the design we were promised. And it is right to hold Barron Collier to the vision it sold us, as loudly and as often and as patiently as it takes.
But being right is not enough. A right that is never exercised is a right that is quietly surrendered, and surrender is precisely what is being counted on. The developer’s strategy does not require our consent. It requires only our silence — our absence from the meetings, our resignation, our willingness to grumble in private while signing nothing, attending nothing, and contesting nothing. That silence is the only thing standing between Ave Maria and the cul-de-sac wasteland its founding plan was written to prevent. We propose to end it.
This is the work of the Ave Maria Heritage Society, and it is the work of every resident who loves this town. It looks like showing up — to the board meetings, the hearings, the public comment periods, in numbers that cannot be ignored. It looks like reading the plans, the covenants, the resolutions, and the records, and holding every decision against the founding vision in the calm, unanswerable light of the facts. It looks like demanding what the founding vision demands: owner-occupancy and lease-term protections, a town center that faces the Church rather than the highway, density that serves a walkable town rather than an investor’s spreadsheet. And it looks toward a decisive horizon — the mandatory update of the town’s Urban Area Map this December, the statutory moment at which control of the board can finally begin to pass to the residents who actually live here. That moment will not seize itself. It must be watched, prepared for, and fought for, by residents who refuse to be governed as an afterthought in their own home.
A town, in the end, is a kind of promise made in stone and street and steeple. Ave Maria was built around a church for a reason, and that reason is still legible to anyone who walks Annunciation Circle at dusk and lets the street carry his eye to where it was always meant to rest. Barron Collier made that promise. We intend to make them keep it — and we cannot do it alone.
Come stand at the head of the street with us. The vista is still there. Let us not be the generation that let it be paved over.
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. avemariaculture.org
