Delivering on His Word

Pizza-empire founder is giving away his fortune to Catholic causes

By DOMENICA MARCHETTI

Thomas S. Monaghan spent 38 years building Domino's Pizza into the world's largest fast-food delivery chain.

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That accomplishment, he says, was but a prelude to what he calls "the main event" in his life: his philanthropic support of Roman Catholic causes.

Over the next 20 years, Mr. Monaghan says, he plans to give away the majority of his fortune -- estimated to be close to $900-million -- through his Ave Maria Foundation.

In his small, windowless office at Domino's Farms, a 250-acre parcel of grassy slopes located on the outskirts of this city, the man who once occupied a two-story executive office suite appointed with raw-silk-covered ceilings and leather floor tiles sits beneath bookshelves displaying a collection of crystal and ceramic statuettes of the Virgin Mary and explains the singular focus of his giving.

"This may sound kind of wrong if it's said wrong," he says, "but there's a lot of philanthropy out there, a lot of people giving money to social causes like fighting poverty, or to medical research. These are all very good things, but I don't think they're as important as helping people get to heaven.

"All of the problems that we hear about -- the school system, teen pregnancy, crime, drugs, and on and on -- when people talk about these things they usually blame them on the breakdown in the family. But they never go to the next step and ask why the breakdown in family. It has to be because of the lack of religion."

To combat the nation's "moral crisis," as he terms it, the 62-year-old Mr. Monaghan has been giving tens of millions of dollars to Catholic education and other religious causes through the Ave Maria Foundation. The foundation, which Mr. Monaghan created as the Domino's Foundation in 1983, received approximately $250-million after he sold all but a 7-per-cent stake in Domino's Pizza last September for nearly $1-billion.

The infusion immediately transformed the foundation from a small private fund with about $8.5-million in assets into a major philanthropy. His plan, he says, is to build and support numerous Catholic education institutions and to support other Catholic causes for the next 20 years -- and then "to die broke."

The most ambitious of his philanthropic projects, announced in April, is the Ave Maria School of Law, which is scheduled to open here in the fall of 2000. Mr. Monaghan has already committed $50-million over five years to get the institution off the ground. The Catholic school will combine legal advocacy with the moral teachings of the church.

Both Mr. Monaghan and Bernard Dobranski, who left his post as dean of Catholic University of America's School of Law to serve as Ave Maria's first dean, say they are committed to building an institution that is academically rigorous and technologically advanced. At the same time, they say, they want the school to produce a crop of lawyers who will fold spirituality into their legal work.

"Any good law course, no matter where it's taught, probes the underlying values that led to a particular rule of law being created," Mr. Dobranski says. "What we're suggesting is that when you're talking about the values, that the Catholic values are also an important part of that."

The law school is just one of several Catholic educational institutions that Mr. Monaghan has started in recent years.

In 1998 he established the Ave Maria Institute, a two-year Catholic liberal-arts college here that he plans to expand to a four-year institution. In 1995 he founded Spiritus Sanctus Academy, a private Catholic secondary school that has three locations in Michigan and one in Honduras, and which Mr. Monaghan hopes eventually to franchise, much like he did his pizza-delivery stores.

The foundation also supports numerous other Catholic non-profit ventures that Mr. Monaghan has started over the last 12 years, and which are based at Domino's Farms. They include:

* Legatus, a support organization for Catholic corporate leaders and their spouses, whose mission is to "study, live, and spread the Faith in our business, professional, and personal lives." Members include Frank A. Olson, chief executive of the Hertz Corporation, and Wellington Mara, owner of the New York Giants football team.

* The Thomas More Center for Law and Justice, a Catholic law center that defends religious rights and plans to focus much of its resources on overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

* Credo, a weekly newspaper distributed free to Catholic households in the Ann Arbor area. Its intended audience is what Mr. Monaghan calls "marginal" or "cultural" Catholics, those who were brought up in the faith but are not devout practitioners.

And since 1985, Mr. Monaghan has supported a Catholic mission in a rural mining area south of San Pedro Sula, in Honduras. His first act of charity there was to buy a four-wheel-drive pickup truck to replace the parish priest's mule. His support has allowed the parish to add many amenities, including a medical clinic and a pharmacy, a ceramics operation where women make religious artifacts, and a chicken farm whose earnings finance the studies of new priests.

One of the most controversial of Mr. Monaghan's philanthropic causes has been his long-time support of the anti-abortion movement, a position that prompted the National Organization for Women to organize a boycott against Domino's in the 1980s. In fact, he is so strong in his anti-abortion beliefs that he uses the date he was conceived, rather than his birth date, to calculate his age, and thus considers himself to be 63.

He continues to support the cause through the Thomas More Center. Open since January, the center has already taken on a high-profile and controversial case involving a group of anti-abortion activists. The activists were convicted of threatening the lives of doctors who performed abortions by distributing Old West-style "wanted" posters containing the names and addresses of the doctors.

Richard Thompson, executive director of the Thomas More Center, defends the organization's decision to handle the appeal.

"Our aim is to overthrow Roe v. Wade, to bring prayer and religion back into the school system, where it was until just a few decades ago, and to return our nation back to the principles upon which it was founded," he says.

That strategy worries people like Janet Benshoof, president of the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy, a non-profit legal organization in New York that has been defending abortion rights since the Roe decision was issued.

"These people are aiming for a Christian nation," Ms. Benshoof says. "What's scary about this is that they're training lawyers to provide a whole legal infrastructure to the religious right."

Indeed, in recent years, a growing network of conservative Christian legal groups has been successful in the courtroom on numerous fronts, from lifting restrictions on school prayer to winning an array of limits that make it harder for women to get abortions.

"These organizations understand that transforming the law is the surest way to fundamentally restructure our society," Ms. Benshoof says.

But while changing society is certainly one of Mr. Monaghan's philanthropic goals, it is not his principal one.

"My overall goal in giving is to save as many souls for the buck as I can," he says. "To me that's why we're here. That's why we were created: to be with God forever in heaven."

That sense of purpose is reflected in the operations at Domino's Farms. While the complex still houses the headquarters of Domino's Pizza, it has also become something of a Catholic enclave in a city dominated by the University of Michigan and known nationally for its liberal values and annual marijuana smoke-fests.

The Catholic Campaign for America, a charity that encourages Catholics to be more active in promoting the church's teachings and in seeking to influence public policy, recently moved its headquarters here. The complex also includes a religious gift shop and book store, and a small chapel where mass is said four times a day. Three times a day Mr. Monaghan and his employees stop what they're doing to pray aloud.

Mr. Monaghan's unwavering devotion to the church stretches back to his early years. He was just shy of 5 when his father died and his mother, who could not afford to care for her two young sons, sent them to live in a Catholic orphanage.

"Catholicism was injected into every part of the day, and I'm very thankful for that," he says, although he admits that life in the orphanage was regimented and far from fun. He ironed shirts by the hundreds and routinely cleaned the carved banisters of the orphanage's main staircase.

When he was 12, Mr. Monaghan returned to live with his mother in Traverse City, Mich., but their relationship deteriorated quickly, and he spent the next several years with foster families, working on their farms, attending school, and immersing himself in books about architecture.

Mr. Monaghan says he continued to attend mass regularly, in part for the continuity it brought to his otherwise unstructured life. His faith was strengthened by his friendship with a priest who looked after him.

However, his own aspirations of becoming a priest were derailed when he was dismissed from St. Joseph's Seminary, in Grand Rapids, for starting pillow fights and whispering during periods of silence. He confesses that he knew long before then that he might not have what it takes to enter the priesthood. "I wanted to be a priest from the time I was in the second grade," he says. "Then I sat behind this girl in the seventh grade, and I completely forgot about it."

Another dream -- to study architecture at the University of Michigan -- died when he could not scrape together enough money to attend. Instead, he and his brother bought a small pizza parlor for $900. Within a year, his brother traded his share for Mr. Monaghan's Volkswagen Beetle, leaving Mr. Monaghan to run the business.

Through numerous ups and downs, he transformed it into a huge pizza empire and, in the process, got to enjoy the trappings of enormous wealth: collecting antique cars and owning a corporate jet, an island in northern Michigan, the Detroit Tigers baseball team, and the world's largest private collection of Frank Lloyd Wright artifacts.

But the financial success he worked so hard to attain was a great source of tension for him as he sought to reconcile his wealth and position -- and what he calls an undisciplined streak -- with his faith. He always tried to run Domino's according to the Golden Rule, he says, although he admits that sometimes, "it was hard to live up to."

Then, in 1989, he read Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis -- the book that inspired Charles Colson to start Prison Fellowship Ministries. Mr. Monaghan saw himself in the chapter on pride and became upset.

"It was about ego," he says. "It's like it was written just for me. I was getting into too many things that were drawing attention to myself."

He took what he calls a "millionaire's vow of poverty," and divested himself of many of his luxuries. He stopped work on a $7-million house designed by the renowned architect Faye Jones, which to this day sits unfinished underneath protective cover. He gave up driving luxury cars (he now drives a Mercury Suburban) and flying first class. Because he has a sweet tooth, he gave up dessert entirely. One object of affection that he did hold on to was the trophy from the 1984 World Series, which the Tigers won while he was the team's owner. It sits on a pedestal in his outer office.

Mr. Monaghan even put Domino's up for sale, but took the helm back two and a half years later after no suitable buyer emerged and the company's financial health was failing. Last year, when the opportunity to sell presented itself, he took it, and decided to devote himself full time to his philanthropy.

While he is forthcoming about his growing commitment to giving to Catholic causes, Mr. Monaghan is intensely private when it comes to talking about his family, declining even to answer questions about whether his wife or four grown daughters are involved at all in good works. Although he says he has sought advice from family members and long-time friends, he adds that in the end he's "pretty much a one-man show" when it comes to making decisions on how to give away his money.

For the most part, Mr. Monaghan has not flaunted his charity.

For years he has anonymously provided high-school and college scholarships to children at Catholic schools, requiring in return that they promise to recite the rosary daily for the rest of their lives.

"I believe I'm giving them something more valuable than the money," he says.

Although he has bankrolled the construction of buildings at Franciscan University and elsewhere, he has never allowed his name to be put on them. Only once, many years ago, when he donated $2,500 to restore the doors of a small church outside Ann Arbor, he had a plaque placed in his father's name. And even with repeated protests, he was unable to stop a parish in Managua from including his name on a plaque listing those who had donated to the construction of a new cathedral. (Mr. Monaghan donated $3.5-million of the $4.5-million cost of the project and led the drive to raise the rest.)

"I don't want to get a lot of thanks for giving," he says. "I don't want to feel that's the reason I should be giving. Maybe for eternal rewards, but not in this world."