While a lot of attention has been focused on Ave Maria, the shiny new Catholic-centric town in Florida, less attention has been focused on the university sprouting up around it. This, too, is the brainchild of zillionaire and pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan. Now a newspaper in Kansas gives us a peek:

Rising 10 stories from former citrus and pasture land, the Oratory of Ave Maria University looks like a gigantic steel-and-stone artifact of the Industrial Age. But it’s the vision of a former pizza magnate — his citadel of faith and learning in southwest Florida.

Now that the 4-year-old Catholic school has a permanent home, Thomas S. Monaghan smiles confidently.

“It’s like when we finally had a headquarters for Domino’s Pizza,” Monaghan said, relaxing in the student reading room of the sprawling university where he is chancellor. “We weren’t settled until then. But after then, we took off.

“Now that we’re here, I think this will become one of the fastest-growing private schools in the country.”

It’s an ambitious statement for a college built on the edge of the Big Cypress Swamp in an area better known for retirees, sod farms and winter vegetables. But if it doesn’t thrive, it won’t be for lack of money or effort at the new school.

Reporters at an open house last week found a 930-acre campus with the church, classrooms, science labs, a huge library and a student union — plus the beginnings of a 4,070-acre town.

It’s the fruit of a campaign by Monaghan to create “an outstanding liberal arts school, coupled with outstanding spiritual fidelity to the church.”

Not a conservative school, he stressed, a label that many have pinned on the university. But one that “is in line with the pope, the Vatican and teachers of the church.”

As such, he said, Ave Maria emphasizes doctrinal and sexual fidelity, plus regular attendance at Mass, confession and religious holy days.

By 2008, Monaghan estimates, he will have donated $300 million to $400 million to the university, including land, building and operating costs. He also plans to move his Ave Maria School of Law from Michigan to Florida by 2009.

The university emphaszies a general liberal arts education, including religion, philosophy, political science, literature, math and Latin. The academics were the “hard part,” according to Nicholas J. Healy Jr., the university’s president.

Healy echoed his boss’s beliefs, saying Ave Maria is a “normal Catholic university — although these days, normal doesn’t mean typical. Most of our faculty are Catholic, and our students are taught a Catholic moral life. If you’re looking for a party school, for hooking up and binge drinking, this isn’t the place for you.”

The plans are ambitious, to say the least. Could this become a Steubenville of the south? Stay tuned.

Photo: Thomas Monaghan, from the Kansas City Star