Building Florida's Communion Community

What do New Urbanism, thousands of acres of dusty old tomato fields and a 65-foot-tall crucifix have in common? Two things, actually: Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, and Ave Maria, his future Catholic dream town located 17 miles northeast of Naples, Fla. Even as home prices soften in much of Florida, Monaghan is pushing ahead with his Sunshine State utopia, which he hopes will eventually house as many as 25,000 doctrinaire Catholics by the time it is built out in the next decade or so. Monaghan has invested $400 million of his own money into the project, which had its groundbreaking in March.

...The catchment for Ave Maria is a mighty one: there are more than 65 million baptized Catholics in the U.S. And having a town built just for them is not a bad bet. Anne Morrow Doherty, herself a devout Catholic, told the Chicago Tribune that she will move to Ave Maria: 'It's a miracle. We need communities such as this and God has chosen the Catholic Church to build it.' "