Monaghan

A Life

Pizza mogul, sports owner, billionaire, devout Catholic, university founder, philanthropist. These are just a few of the many words that describe Tom Monaghan. The man who built Domino’s Pizza into an empire, owned the Detroit Tigers, built a Catholic college, then moved it halfway across the country and turned it into a university surrounded by a growing city…is all of those things and more. Much more as both his admirers and detractors would say. In short, like all humans, he is complex. But at his core is an unwavering Catholicism that has strengthened him amidst adversity and grounded him amidst prosperity. In this volume, Joseph Pearce, the preeminent Catholic biographer of our time, traces Monaghan’s life story from “the gutter to the stars” and, with his own deep knowledge of and devotion to Catholicism, is able to tell it in such a way that the reader will realize and appreciate that, despite missteps along the way, the subject is a man whose greatest desire is not to be among “the stars,” but rather among the saints in heaven at the end of his earthly pilgrimage. And that, ultimately, should be the desire of us all, flawed as we all are. The life of Tom Monaghan is an inspiring story of success in the face of what, for many, may have been insurmountable odds, of determination to succeed when it would have been easy to quit, and of a childhood faith rediscovered that changed his life and the lives of so many others.