Ave Maria: A Challenge Among Friends

Ave Maria, Florida. I’m in this pioneer town, about fifty minutes from Naples, Florida, to do two talks on natural law at Ave Maria University. The place is exotic because it is so different from academic towns in the Northeast, and not merely in the weather, forever spring.   But it is also “familiar” to some of us because it suddenly transports us into a world we used to know in the forties and fifties: a neighborhood with a virtual society of children, roaming freely at large because the community is filled with “catchers-in-the rye”– an ample supply of grownups always looking out, ready to pluck spirited kids from the occasional hazard. A community has been taking hold for about eight years, built around this new university, designed to be thoroughly and militantly Catholic.