DOMINO THEORY





I’LL HAVE A LARGE IRISH PIZZA
topped with monomania sausage, Guiness cheese, hair-trigger hot peppers, and magic healing-Mass mushrooms, with an extra large glass of Monaghan’s Ol' Fashioned More-Catholic-than-the-Pope Kool-Aid and a side order of Insular/Oedipal emotional-blackmail slaw.





Dominator’s Pizza magnate Tom Monaghan’s latest chess-move in his micro-management of that Floridian Portmeirion

known as Ave Maria University has been to fire Provost [professor of theology & philosophy, promoter of good liturgy, founder of Ignatius Press, all-round “can-he-really-be-Jesuit?” Catholic shite-disturber] and FOB [friend of Benedict] Fr. Joseph Fessio –

only to rehire him 24 hours later, albeit in some truncated capacity.

I’m not totally up to speed on the finer points of the AMU chronicle, beyond the general awareness that it is hemorrhaging students, faculty, and public good-will (and probably financial support) as Monaghan seems increasingly determined to create this new Catholic World in His Own Image (something done earlier, better, by a whole Trinity of talented Persons), and to have a ready answer for that nagging Portmeirion question, "Who is Number One?"

Not content with personally molding all the statues in his Catholic Town / Higher Education theme park (click here, and be afraid, be very afraid), scuttlebutt is that Monaghan has finally exerted sufficient pressure on the more established and more successful (owing to its being more independent) Ave Maria School of Law to force closure of its Ann Arbor, Michigan, campus, and kit-and-kaboodle-transfer to the AMU Naples, Florida, campus. (“See Naples and die”?) (see “hemorrhaging” above)

Massive weeping and gnashing of teeth greeted the surprise (you-have-24-hours-to-clean-out-your-desk) firing of Fr. Fessio, especially on the part of students. It took only a day for Monaghan and Corp. to rescind the FIAT, and offer Fessio an “association” which will see him permitted to attend commencement (and lunch afterwards????), deployed on the Florida campus in the summer with high school students, surveying AMU’s European campi during the regular term—[not so bad: Austria and Rome]-- and possibly wedged into the teaching schedule for next spring as a player to be named later.

University President Nicholas Healy described the recent events as “the separation of Fr. Fessio from the University’s administration.” To my knowledge Fessio was neither married to nor physiologically conjoined with the University administration, nor was March 21 the date of his divorce proceedings and/or surgical detachment-- separation? say again?

I leave all this to wiser, better-informed, and more wickedly funny people than me to make sense of [ here and here ]. My parting shot is that a reformed and revivified Catholic Church must surely be added to that long list of things that Money Can’t Buy Me—Everybody Tells Me So—No No No NO.

If I ever had any enthusiasm for the enthusiasms of Tom Monaghan (and I have to admit I once did), it all came to an end when I got a look at the GOD-AWFUL design his administrative star-chamber had passed for gajillion-dollar chapel at his Catholic Town campus. SWEETE JESU!!!!!






Apparently it was generally considered such a gross-out that the design was revised. Oh, this is MUCH better!









The Curt Jester feels that the Church of Monaghan has actually come full circle and re-instituted the whole concept of radio-based revivalism. Look out, Aimee Semple McPherson, your day has re-dawned!:





The Jester proposes an interior design which could start a whole new communications revolution called “AMU-Tube”.


Comments at the Jester’s include the dedication of this edifice as the "Shrine of Saints Amos and Andy”.

Provosts come and go, staff gets hired and fired, but architectural crime is forever.