I’ve got decidedly mixed feelings about Tom Monaghan’s new Catholic town, Ave Maria, in Florida. Now it’s getting more attention, as it nears completion — or at least, nears the point where people will begin living there:

Ave Maria has not been without controversy. The Florida American Civil Liberties Union has threatened to sue if the town bans birth control, as Monaghan suggested in a speech. Catholic educators say he could have found better ways to reach out than to create a town where single-family home prices start at $450,000.

Monaghan, 70, remains steadfast. “Everything I do I think I do for the right purposes,” he says. “I only have to answer to my God.”

The town and university will operate independently but the Catholic influence is hard to miss. Streets bear names like Assisi and Annunciation. The town center holds a cathedral-size chapel based on a design Monaghan sketched himself. Atop it is a 13-foot-high cross, the highest point in the town.

The seeds for this $400 million enterprise were sown in 1998, the year Monaghan sold his pizza business for $1 billion and founded Ave Maria College, a liberal arts school in Ypsilanti, Mich. (It closed this year.) By 2000, he had founded Ave Maria School of Law there; it is set to relocate to Florida in 2009.

In 2002, real estate development company Barron Collier offered to donate 1,000 acres of southwestern Florida farmland for Monaghan’s dream university. He partnered with the company to create a town to support it. He has committed more than $200 million to build the university and invested $100 million to develop the town. Profits from that investment will go to the university.

Monaghan dismisses questions about whether the town will tolerate non-Catholic views. But he created a stir last year when he was quoted as having said in a speech to a Catholic men’s conference that pharmacies wouldn’t be allowed to stock condoms or birth control pills and that cable TV would show no pornography.

Monaghan has since said he misspoke. Project manager Donald Schrotenboer says the town will obey all local ordinances, but officials “would prefer” that businesses sell only products consistent with a family-friendly environment.

The idea of a faith-filled town is not unappealing, but this sounds creepily like an upscale Catholic ghetto. Or, maybe, a Catholics-only gated community/country club.

The great challenge of living the faith lies in being, to a great extent, counter-cultural, and bearing witness to Christ in a not-always-sympathetic world. But it’s hard to be counter-cultural when the prevailing culture is made up of people just like you.

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds, and whether it succeeds.