Ave Maria is coming into being at the dawn of the worst real estate recession since the early 1990s, in a place that could fairly be called the epicenter of the bust. According to one recent study, the Naples area is the spot in America most at risk for a steep drop in home prices. But the deeper problem may be a conflict between Monaghan and his partners over Ave Maria's identity. At this perilous juncture in the town's existence, they can't agree about how Catholic it should be. Barron Collier and Pulte, both of which are far more interested in profits than prophets, are downplaying the role of religion in the town's development, marketing Ave Maria as a place no more intrinsically Catholic than St. Louis or Corpus Christi, Texas.

But Monaghan and the believers who surround him say that the town's religious character is its great strength, not only spiritually but commercially. They worry that by pitching the development to home buyers as just another anodyne suburb, Barron Collier and Pulte risk alienating the very people most inclined to make Ave Maria their home. "I wonder sometimes whether they don't treat this as if it's the same as every other development they do," Monaghan says of his secular partners. "I think if they put a lot of money into marketing to the general population, they might be wasting a lot of it."

Early indications suggest he may be right. While there are no official records of exactly how many of the town's 260 or so pioneers are Catholic, interviews with Ave Maria's developers, real estate brokers, business owners, and the residents themselves make it clear that the early wave of settlers are here because they share Tom Monaghan's dream.

As Monaghan originally envisioned it, Ave Maria was to be a sort of Catholic haven, where students, priests, nuns, and devout laypeople came and went to the sound of church bells. He spoke of prohibiting the sale of contraceptives and pornography and restricting the selection of cable-TV channels in his town, thus shutting out a mainstream world that has become captivated, in Monaghan's view, by sex and a "culture of death." But bruising publicity and lawsuit threats forced him to set aside those plans, at least publicly, and to hand the lead marketing role to Barron Collier and Pulte. Since last winter, television commercials and billboards around Naples have been advertising the development with the slogan "Every family, every lifestyle, every dream."

"They're trying to disguise it," says the Reverend Joseph Fessio, a priest and confidant of Pope Benedict XVI's who is Ave Maria University's theologian-in-residence. "Every lifestyle? That's kind of a code word."

Monaghan, for his part, has made a public show of downsizing the scope of his plans. In part, that's a financial necessity. He likes to say that he has two goals in life: One is to get as many souls as he can into heaven, and the other is to die broke. He's making measurable progress toward the latter. Even after scaling down the size of the church and reducing the number of school buildings, the project has cost far more than he expected. The budget for starting the university has ballooned to at least $231 million. That's about $55 million more than the original budget, according to his charitable foundation's tax returns. Monaghan's share of the university's construction costs alone has come to $168 million. His investment in the real estate side is harder to quantify. He paid an estimated $116 million to purchase land and acquire the necessary development credits. The cost of building the town of Ave Maria, believed to be about $200 million so far, has been split according to an unknown formula among Monaghan, Barron Collier, and Pulte.