Tom Monaghan

In 1983, Monaghan bought the Detroit Tigers, who won the World Series a year later. In 1984, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[19] He became close to Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who remained a close friend, business associate and participant in his many philanthropic works.[20] Monaghan ultimately sold the Tigers to his competitor Mike Ilitch of Little Caesar's Pizza in 1992. Combining his passion for pizza and baseball, his 1986 autobiography was titled Pizza Tiger. Shortly before giving up control of the team, Monaghan made the much-maligned and eventually reversed decision to fire legendary broadcaster Ernie Harwell.

Monaghan is an admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, and the Domino's headquarters in Ann Arbor Township, Michigan, strongly resembles Wright's Prairie School architecture adapted to a larger scale. The headquarter's address of 24 Frank Lloyd Wright Drive also shows Monaghan's admiration. He has been one of the foremost collectors of Wright artifacts, including an oak dining room table and chairs for which he paid $1.6 million.[21] He purchased a portion of Drummond Island in Michigan, where he created a private resort complex featuring buildings designed in the style of Wright, and later sold it to Clifton Haley and Denny Bailey.

Another of Monaghan's expensive passions had been automobiles, and for a time his collection included one of the world's six Bugatti Royales, for which he paid $8.1 million in 1986, and sold it for $8 million in 1991.

In the early 1990s he also built a mansion in a Honduras mountain town, and funded and supervised the construction of a new cathedral in Managua, Nicaragua, after the old cathedral was destroyed in a 1972 earthquake.[22]

In 1983 he established the Mater Christi Foundation, today known as the Ave Maria Foundation,[26] to focus on Catholic education, media, community projects and other charities. Monaghan is founder and CEO of Legatus International, an organization of business Executives, Presidents, CEOs, and their spouses who are committed to studying, living and spreading the Catholic faith. Founded in 1987, Legatus empowers their 5,000+ members to boldly live their Catholic identity as "Ambassadors for Christ in the Marketplace".[27] In 1988, Pope John Paul II addressed members of Legatus and encouraged them, “The world needs genuine witnesses to Christian ethics in the field of business and the Church asks you to fulfill this role publicly with courage and perseverance.”[28]

In 1997, he recruited former Evangelical pastor Al Kresta to lead Ave Maria Communications, which became the first Catholic radio apostolate in America with the popularly known Ave Maria Radio.[29][30] He also established the Ave Maria List[31] anti-abortion political action committee, and the Thomas More Law Center,[32] a public interest law firm dedicated to promoting social conservative issues such as opposition to abortion, same sex marriage, and secularism.

In addition, his foundation established the Spiritus Sanctus Academies.[33] These elementary schools are administered by the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.[34]

The Ave Maria Foundation has subsequently fine-tuned its focus to higher education, and has established both a university and a law school.[9] Along with that change in focus, many of the other non-profit entities that the Ave Maria Foundation established have become independent or are in the process of being weaned from Ave Maria Foundation grants.

Monaghan is reputed to be a member of Opus Dei and has been aligned with a number of other conservative Catholic organizations and causes.[35]

Monaghan is a donor to Priests for Life, a Roman Catholic anti-abortion organization.[36] He is a knight of magistral grace in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

The Ave Maria School of Law,[37] previously located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, opened its doors in 2000, and received full accreditation from the American Bar Association in 2005. The school was a dream of several professors from the Catholic University of Detroit Mercy, who publicly left that institution when it allowed several pro-choice members of the Michigan Supreme Court to appear at the school's annual "Red Mass". Professors Stephen Safranek, Mollie Murphy, Richard Myers and Joseph Falvey, setting out to form a new orthodox Catholic law school, presented their idea to Monaghan (who had previously been a strong supporter of opening a new law school at Franciscan University) to provide significant funding through his Ave Maria Foundation. Together they enlisted Bernard Dobranski, Dean at The Catholic University of America's law school and former Dean of Detroit Mercy's Law School, to lead up the new school as dean. Monaghan served as president of the school's Board of Governors.

Faculty members have included conservative legal scholar and Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia assisted in developing the school's curriculum, and the school's first annual Ave Maria Lecture was presented by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in 1999. The school's stated goal is to educate competent moral attorneys who will influence all aspects of the legal profession and advance natural law theory. The Ave Maria Law School graduated its last Michigan class in the Spring of 2009 and immediately relocated to Naples, Florida permanently.[9]

As a step to fulfilling his dream of creating a new Catholic university, Monaghan founded Ave Maria College[38] in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In various attempts to accelerate accreditation, Monaghan acquired St. Mary's College of Orchard Lake and a campus in Nicaragua, renamed Ave Maria College of the Americas.

Due to lack of funding, the college, against faculty and student protests, closed in 2007. Alternative funding was not secured to prevent the school's closure. St. Mary's College was sold and is now under the auspices of nearby Madonna University.

In early 2002 Monaghan sought to establish the Ave Maria University[39] in Ann Arbor, at Domino's Farms, the large corporate office park that he owned and leased to Domino's Pizza. The plans included a 250-foot crucifix, taller than the Statue of Liberty.[7] Local officials refused to approve the zoning change, forcing him to look elsewhere for a site. Eventually, community leaders in Collier County, Florida, offered him a large undeveloped tract of land thirty miles east of Naples, Florida to develop the university.[9]

In February 2006, ground was broken for the new Catholic university and town, Ave Maria, Florida.[40] A joint venture, in which Monaghan is a 50% partner with developer Barron Collier, controls all non-university real estate in the town, and plans to build 11,000 homes and several business districts. Pulte Homes has been signed up to build most of the private homes. Monaghan said in 2005 that any town retailers would not be allowed to sell contraceptives or pornography, a statement that drew legal criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union.[41]

Threatened with lawsuits, Monaghan and the developers went on a national public relations campaign in March 2007 to retract the notion that Catholic doctrine could ever be enforced as law.[42] Defenders of Wildlife also challenged the development, stating it is destroying habitat of the endangered Florida panther.[43]

Monaghan helped to establish the Ave Maria Mutual Funds by asking friend George P. Schwartz of Schwartz Investment Counsel, Inc. to launch the Ave Maria Catholic Values Fund in May 2001. There are now five Ave Maria Mutual Funds. They are described as targeted at investors seeking to place their money in companies whose operations are in keeping with the core teachings of the Catholic Church. The fund calls their shareholders "morally responsible investors". The funds are open to individual investors with a $1,000 minimum investment.

Monaghan is a member of the Catholic Advisory Board. The board sets the religious criteria that screen companies before the funds will invest in them. Involvement with contraception, non-marital partner employee benefits, pornography, and abortion are some issues that disqualify a company from the fund. Lou Holtz, Larry Kudlow, Michael Novak, Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Roney are the other members of the Funds' Catholic Advisory Board. Cardinal Adam Maida (of the Archdiocese of Detroit) is the board's ecclesiastic advisor.

Monaghan has been active in Republican Party politics, and was one of the key financial backers of Sam Brownback in his 2008 presidential campaign.[44] Monaghan also endorsed Donald Trump during his 2020 presidential campaign.[45]