Philanthropist Puts His Faith in a New Law School — and Stirs Up Debate

Running a pizza-delivery empire taught Thomas S. Monaghan a lot more than just how to make dough.

The founder and former chairman of Domino’s Pizza, who retired last year, says he spent considerable time defending his company and pizza-delivery drivers from thousands of lawsuits.

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Delivering on His Word

Many of them, he says, were brought by lawyers whom he perceived to be unethical and merely seeking to raid his company’s coffers — the kinds of lawyers who have used the legal system to contribute to what Mr. Monaghan believes to be the moral corrosion of society.

Now, Mr. Monaghan is using that same instrument — the law — to fight back against the decay.

Last spring Mr. Monaghan, a devout Roman Catholic, announced that he is financing the creation of the Ave Maria School of Law, which he says will integrate legal education with the moral and religious teachings of the church, and turn out graduates who will view the law as a vocation and bring their faith into the courtroom. He has already committed $50-million to build and operate the school over the next five years. It is scheduled to open here in the fall of 2000.

And last January, he opened the Thomas More Center for Law and Justice, a non-profit legal organization that defends religious rights. Already the center has taken on a high-profile case, defending the rights of anti-abortion activists who last February were ordered to pay $107-million to two clinics and doctors for threatening them by posting their names and addresses on the Internet. The law school and the Thomas More Center, also based here, will work closely together, with Ave Maria faculty members providing pro bono services to the center, and students honing their legal skills through internships there.

Although the law school has yet to open its doors, it has already attracted critics in Catholic philanthropy and Catholic legal education, who disagree with Mr. Monaghan’s assertion that Ave Maria is needed because existing Catholic law schools have lost their spiritual moorings.

“I’m very much in favor of Catholic education, and Catholic education certainly needs more money,” says the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, editor of America Magazine, a national Catholic weekly publication.

“But I wonder how much sense it makes to open a new law school, rather than support existing ones that have libraries and professional reputations.”

He adds, “Frankly, I think the money could be better used by supporting an existing school, endowing chairs, and providing scholarships for poor students.”

In fact, Mr. Monaghan’s original plan was not to start his own institution but to support the creation of one at Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Ohio, where he had been a member of the board of trustees for a dozen years. But Mr. Monaghan says he was so disappointed when the university decided not to go through with its plan that he decided to take on the project himself.

It’s a reaction that shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows Mr. Monaghan, says Joseph L. Falvey, a law professor who served briefly as acting dean of Ave Maria and will teach when the institution opens.

“He spent his whole life building his company and riding it through ups and downs,” Mr. Falvey says. “Building is something that drives him, and this is an opportunity to build a top-line, state-of-the-art law school.”

Bernard Dobranski, a former dean at Catholic University of America’s School of Law who since this summer has served as dean at Ave Maria, says he agrees with Mr. Monaghan that many of religious law schools have lost their spiritual identity in their effort to compete with secular institutions for academic excellence.

“In legal education there’s been a real crisis, particularly over the last 15 to 20 years — crisis in the sense that a lot of people have lost their moorings in terms of what law is grounded in,” Mr. Dobranski says.

He adds, “It’s very difficult for an established institution to make a quantum leap forward, because of baggage that’s accumulated over the years. I can do more with $50-million starting from scratch than I could do at an existing school.”

While there are already 180 law schools in the United States, just 24 of them are Catholic, although that number is on the rise.

Two Catholic universities — Seattle University and Barry University, in Miami, have bought existing law schools and plan to transform them into religious institutions. A new Catholic law school, affiliated with St. Thomas University, in St. Paul, is scheduled to open in 2001 in Minneapolis.

The creation of those new Catholic legal institutions, says Mr. Dobranski, is a sign that there is a need for them. But some critics have taken umbrage at the assertions of those at Ave Maria that the existing schools are not Catholic enough.

“This is a repudiation of what we’ve been trying to do for some 100 years,” says the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, a Jesuit priest who is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

However, even Father Drinan, as well as many other Catholic educators, acknowledge that many Catholic educational institutions in the United States, including law schools, are struggling in their efforts to retain their religious tenor.

“Catholic educators are trying very hard to make their schools as Catholic as possible, but they’re also trying to make them very credible universities among their peers,” says the Rev. Charles Currie, a Jesuit priest who is president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. “Sometimes those desires are in tension, but I think we’re doing a pretty good job of it.”

But not good enough for Mr. Monaghan. He has already announced that Ave Maria intends to comply with Ex corde Ecclesiae, a document issued by Pope John Paul II in 1990 that exhorts Catholic colleges and universities around the world to do more to strengthen their Catholic identity.

Catholic institutions in the United States have balked at some of the guidelines proposed by a committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to implement Ex corde, including one that would require theologians to seek approval from the church for their Catholic teachings.

The bishops are scheduled to vote on the guidelines at a meeting in November.

Conforming to Ex corde is just one of several steps that Mr. Monaghan says Ave Maria will take to safeguard its Catholic identity far into the future. He has also assembled the school’s Board of Governors with that goal in mind. Board members, for example, are appointed by Mr. Monaghan himself, and must meet certain standards and criteria.

“They must be ‘knowledgeable, orthodox Catholics,’” Mr. Monaghan says. “To me that means by the book — following the teachings of the church, changing the things that should be changed, not changing the things that are unchangeable, and being faithful to the Holy Father.”

Current members include Helen M. Alvare, director of planning and information for pro-life activities at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops; U.S. Rep. Henry J. Hyde, Republican of Illinois, who led the House of Representatives’ impeachment hearings against President Clinton; and John Cardinal O’Connor, Archbishop of New York.

Both Mr. Monaghan and Mr. Dobranski say they are committed to building an institution that will compete academically with the nation’s best law schools.

“If we don’t give our students technical competence, then we’re not doing our job,” says Mr. Dobranski.

“But,” he says, “we have to do more than that. It’s very important that law students, who in many cases become leaders in our society, have the kind of training that shows them that the law is something more than whatever the sovereign happens to say at a given moment.”

He adds: “If we turn out people who are just technically competent, then we’re turning out a sterile, incomplete product, in terms of what we profess is our mission. So we have to do both.”