Ave Maria University Gets a New Campus and a Fighter, Father Joseph Fessio

Father Joseph Fessio, SJ

The founder of Ignatius Press and the University of San Francisco's St. Ignatius Institute is now chancellor of Ave Maria University.

The university, to be built east of Naples, Fla., was started with a $220 million commitment from Domino's Pizza founder Thomas Monaghan. Father Fessio promises the university will serve an integral role in solving what he describes as a “truth” crisis in the Church and in Catholic higher education.

He spoke about his vision and plans for the new university with Register correspondent Wayne Laugesen.

Tell me a bit about the roots of your Catholic faith. Are you a cradle Catholic and did you attend Catholic schools?

I was baptized Catholic before I came to any consciousness of it. I attended high school at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, Calif., run by the Jesuits. Then I went to Santa Clara University, another Jesuit school, and I majored in civil engineering.

What made you pursue life in the Jesuit religious order?

I didn't pursue it. It pursued me. I was planning to get married and become a lay missionary in South America working as an engineer. And the girl I found, whom I thought might be a good companion, had already decided to enter the convent.

So you decided to pursue priesthood after she entered the convent?

First I decided to pursue her a little further, and talk her out of entering the convent. But on Holy Thursday 1961, sitting disconsolately in the civil engineering lab at the university, the inspiration came that she should become a nun and I should become a Jesuit priest. So I went to El Retiro retreat house and spoke with Father Zaccheus Maher. We had a good conversation. He thought I should wait until I graduated, because I was a junior at that time. I said, “No, I'm decided and the time is now. I want to go now.” So I applied and entered the Jesuits in the fall of '61.

Have you kept contact with the old girlfriend who became a nun?

Not too much. She ended up leaving the order, living with an ex-priest and selling real estate.

How would you best summarize your philosophy of education?

We all enter the world materially and spiritually poor. We need parents to feed us and to educate us. But we continually need to deepen our knowledge of God, the world and ourselves so we can fulfill our final end, which is to praise and worship God. The purpose of education is to transmit to younger generations the truths that we have received and discovered ourselves in order to prepare them to be good citizens of this world and good citizens of the next.

How were you chosen as chancellor for Ave Maria University in Florida? Why you?

I have to thank Charlie Rice, of Notre Dame Law School [professor emeritus, and visiting professor at Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich.]. Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, had decided to establish a new Catholic university and had selected Nicholas Healy as the first president of the university itself, as an interim president. Those working to establish the university were looking for a permanent president. Rice suggested me to Monaghan and Healy. After discussion, I suggested that Nick remain as president but that I become chancellor and be part of the administrative team.

What does the role of chancellor mean at Ave Maria University?

The title chancellor was intentionally chosen for its vagueness. This is an enormous undertaking of a magnitude that's hard even to imagine. No one person can organize it all. So, my role is to be part of the administrative team made up of Chairman of the Board Monaghan, President Healy, Provost Michael Healy, the financial officer Paul Roney, and the dean of the law school, Bernard Dobranski, to make this dream a reality. Some of my roles will include establishing a nationwide network of founders, to recruit students, to develop academic programs and to help plan the new campus.

When will the new campus officially open for business?

We've applied for licensure in the state of Florida and we anticipate receiving it in time to open in the fall of 2003 as a degree site of Ave Maria College, Michigan.

You say part of your job will be to recruit founders. What are founders in this context?

Most universities, when they undertake new development, turn to their alumni or use their endowment. Ave Maria has neither alumni nor endowment. But I sense there are many Catholics across the country who recognize that the present crisis in the Church is a crisis of truth, and there is need for a new Catholic university that will help restore a culture of truth. So I have been contacting people around the country to see if they would be willing to join us as founders of Ave Maria, by paying or pledging $10 a month for a year.

You mentioned “crisis,” so let's talk a bit about the crisis in Catholic education. We had the 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae , in which Pope John Paul II tried to bring Catholic universities more in line with the teachings of the Church. Despite Ex Corde Ecclesiae and any progress it might have brought about, have we really lost some of the world's best-known Catholic colleges and universities to secularism?

I'll let your readers form their own opinions on that, based on their own experiences. But I can say this: We joyously and wholeheartedly wish to follow the tradition of the Catholic Church in our educational mission, as beautifully expressed by Ex Corde Ecclesiae. We plan to make Ave Maria a model of what the magisterium has in mind for a genuine Catholic university.

How will you maintain the focus? How will you keep Ave Maria focused on Catholic morality and theology and still be considered a major, serious academic university by mainstream American culture?

The Catholic Church invented universities. The University of Bologna was founded in 1088, more than 150 years before the universities of Paris and Oxford were founded. Incidentally, there was already a university in Naples in 1224, also prior to Paris and Oxford.

The universities arose out of a commitment to truth and the search for truth, which is an integral part of the Catholic faith. So there's nothing incompatible about being a genuine, full university and searching for truth.

As Bowie Kuhn [former baseball commissioner] said at our initial press conference Nov. 20 in Naples: God is truth. If universities are meant to seek truth, they cannot do so without acknowledging the sovereignty of God. God has been abandoned by many of our universities, and therefore they really can't fulfill their purpose.

We have a mission statement that clearly states that we accept the teachings of the Catholic Church wholeheartedly, eagerly and enthusiastically, and we have a board of trustees that accepts that mission. The leaders of the university, the faculty and the staff accept that mission as well.

What quality would you most hope to instill in students?

A consuming love for Jesus Christ and his Church such that they will seek the truth with their whole hearts and live it with their whole lives.

What's going to happen at Ignatius Press now that you're not at the helm full time?

Things will improve, because now I don't get in the way as much. I just help to make policy decisions and decisions on manuscripts, and then I let people get on with their work.

As chancellor of Ave Maria, will you have any kind of formal working relationship with Bishop John Nevins of Venice, Fla., in which Ave Maria will reside?

I report to the president of the university and the board, but the university itself has a very cordial relationship with Bishop Nevins.

Under Ex Corde Ecclesiae , as I understand it, the bishop has a bit of a hands-on role in a university. Will he at Ave Maria?

In accord with Ex Corde Ecclesiae, all of our teachers of theology will ask for the mandatum from Bishop Nevins, and I believe all our faculty and staff will make an oath of fidelity. We think Ex Corde establishes minimum requirements, and we want to be a maximum university.

Why go to southwest Florida, to a place that's on the far fringe of the continental United States?

There is no Catholic university in southwest Florida. Given the history of this region, which is Hispanic, and the future of this region, which is Hispanic—they say in 2050 there will be 100 million Hispanics in the United States—it's crucial that we help Hispanics to deepen their faith, to prepare them to take leadership roles in this society and to maintain their wonderful family values. So I think we are positioned to make a very important contribution to the Church of the 21st century. Southwest Florida gives us excellent proximity to Central America, where we already have a campus in Nicaragua, and to South America.

I understand that you're building a town as well as a university. Please tell me about that.

We're in partnership with an agricultural and land company to build an entire town called Ave Maria, Fla., to support the university. We would imagine that faculty and staff would want to move and live there, and we suspect there will be others, as well, who will want to come.

Also, my former classmate, who's the cardinal of Vienna, Archbishop [Christoph] Schˆnborn, told me they discovered that the Cathedral of St. Stephen was built facing the point where the sun rose on the day that the first stone was laid. And since our university iscalled Ave Maria, I went to the U.S. Naval Observatory Web site to determine at what point the sun rose on March 25, 2000.

So we plan to orient not only the church but also the main street and the town of Ave Maria to the point where the sun rose on the feast of the Annunciation in the year 2000. This will be a sign that we believe this is the university for the new millennium dedicated to our Lady. [On March 25, 2000, the sun rose at 87 degrees, 19 minutes and 8.6 seconds east of true north at 6:24 a.m.]

How large will the university be?

We want to make it large enough that it can be a great university, and that means about 5,000 students—placing it in a category with schools such as Dartmouth and Princeton.

Will there be NCAA football and a team that will have a chance against Notre Dame?

Mr. Monaghan is very committed to a strong sports program and he wants to reach Division 1A as soon as possible. We want Division 1A for football for sure, and I suppose basketball and baseball as well.

Wayne Laugesen writes from Boulder, Colorado.