THE DELIVERER.(Tom Monaghan)(Biography)

Tom Monaghan always believed that someday he would be rich, and when that day finally came, courtesy of a Domino's Pizza empire, he knew just how to proceed. In the nineteen-eighties, as Monaghan attained a place on lists of the wealthiest Americans, he went on a wish-fulfillment spree. He wanted to fly, so he bought a Gulfstream jet and a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. He was a college dropout who had longed to study architecture; instead, he became the world's leading collector of the decorative works of his hero, Frank Lloyd Wright. (For a Wright dining suite he spent $1.6 million.) In his teens, Monaghan had been a penniless car buff; now he acquired a fleet of automobiles, including a handmade Bugatti Royale, and the Packard that conveyed F.D.R. to his second inauguration. As a child in Michigan, Monaghan had found consolation in fanatically following the exploits of the Detroit Tigers; in the autumn of 1983, he bought the team.

The sale of the Tigers came as a surprise to Detroiters. The team was one of the game's great old franchises, but it had gone fifteen seasons without a title. John Fetzer, a baseball patrician who had owned the Tigers since the nineteen-fifties, didn't believe in the new economics of free agency and had refused to enter the bidding wars over ballplayers. But the team had glaring needs, notably at first base and on the left side of the plate. By Christmas, two months after Monaghan's purchase, the Tigers had signed the veteran free-agent slugger Darrell Evans--a left-handed hitter who could play first base.

The following April, in the first Opening Day game of the Tom Monaghan era, Evans hit a three-run home run. Detroit won that game, and the next, and prevailed in thirty-five of its first forty games--an unprecedented streak that also featured a no-hitter by Jack Morris. Detroit fans watched, amazed, as the team compiled a hundred and four victories before sweeping the playoffs, and then winning the World Series. After the final out of the Series, the fans' exuberance overflowed into the streets, and cars were overturned and burned. Hundreds of sportswriters and other stragglers were stranded inside Tiger Stadium when they suddenly heard the sound of a helicopter overhead. It descended toward the field and settled on the dirt behind second base. It was Monaghan's Sikorsky S-76, delivering several hundred pizzas from Domino's.

Buying the Tigers made Monaghan, who was forty-six, a celebrity. Journalists streamed to his office at Domino's Farms, in Ann Arbor, a low-slung headquarters building in the Frank Lloyd Wright style, framed in a picture-book pastoral setting complete with a herd of buffalo. The visitors noted the rosewood decor and other such trappings, as well as Monaghan's apparent humility, his clean life style, and his endearing physical aspect. "His eyes are sincere and alert," one wrote. "Unlined skin and thick brown hair make him appear 10 years younger than he is." The source of Monaghan's wealth--a fast-food chain--was not especially glamorous, but reporters wrote that he lacked the bluster and imperiousness of such peers as the broadcaster Ted Turner and the shipping magnate George Steinbrenner.

"Everything was positive," Monaghan recently reflected, a bit wistfully. "A lot of Horatio Alger stuff. Nothing controversial."

That was before Monaghan decided that his real purpose in life was not baseball, or even the pizza business, but to get as many people as possible into Heaven, starting with himself. He resolved to use his wealth ("God's money,'' he said) to somehow rescue the Catholic Church from what he saw as its slide toward apostasy. Monaghan set out on a course that brought him into the upper circles of the conservative Catholic movement, allied him with anti-Sandinista churchmen in Nicaragua, led to the founding of a law school, and drew Domino's into the fight over abortion in America. Finally, it led him to the edge of the Corkscrew Swamp, in southwest Florida. There, Monaghan means to build a university that will be more Catholic than the University of Notre Dame, surrounded by a new town that will reflect traditional Catholic values. He has committed the bulk of his fortune to the undertaking. In Monaghan's vision, Ave Maria--the name of the school, and the town--will be capable, he said, of "changing the world."

I met Monaghan last autumn, in Florida, toward the end of what had been a difficult year for his Ave Maria project. His face is no longer unlined, and his hair has grayed; he wears rimless spectacles, like those of Donald Rumsfeld, and a hearing aid in each ear. His eyes remain intent. He acknowledged that there had been problems in Florida, partly of his own making. The groundbreaking ceremony had been delayed by storms, and although construction was well under way, rising costs had forced a scaling back of the cathedral at the center of the new town, and of the first phase of the university. It had been harder to attract donors than Monaghan had hoped. There had been terrible publicity after Monaghan said, in a speech to a Catholic men's group, "We're going to control the cable television that comes in the area. There is not going to be any pornographic television in Ave Maria Town. If you go to the drugstore and you want to buy the pill or the condoms or contraception, you won't be able to get that." The A.C.L.U. forecast lawsuits, and on Today Katie Couric asked whether "this is really infringing on civil liberties and freedom of speech and right to privacy and all sorts of basic tenets this country was founded on." Monaghan spent weeks denying that he was building what critics called a "Catholic Jonestown."