This brand new Catholic town, however, will not be in Ireland (they couldn't get planning permission). It will be situated in Florida. It's going to be called . . . wait for it . . .Ave Maria. Its creator, in the temporal sense, is the millionaire founder of Domino pizzas, a man who goes by that wonderfully Italian name, Thomas Monaghan.

So the signs are . . . and this is perhaps a racist thing to say, but I am from the same gene pool as Monaghan, so here goes . . . that his aim is not to create a Catholic town like, for example, Rio de Janeiro or Rome. Now there are two seriously funky Catholic towns.

It is probably also safe to say that he does not aim to reconstruct Seville or Madrid, more's the pity. Signs are that Monaghan is of the school of Irish Catholicism, and it is at this point that we reach for our collective beads.

What we would like to say to Thomas Monaghan, besides "We love pizza, Tom" is "Tom, we should talk." Because those of us who grew up in Catholic towns know that it's no picnic. Amongst the minority Catholic populations of secular countries, eg Britain and America, Catholic towns were always thought to be a bit of a paradise on the grounds that, er, in a Catholic town absolutely everybody would be Catholic. Therefore, as we sat in exile, the argument went that, in a Catholic town, our mortal souls would not be endangered by chance encounters with Protestants, Jews, Hindus or Muslims (actually we hadn't really heard of Muslims in those days).

But when we moved back to the land of Erin, and to a town that was undeniably Catholic, we found that the distinguishing characteristics of a Catholic town were, 1) more litter on the streets, 2) bad driving and, 3) no free orange juice at school.

Later on we found that Catholic towns were not too hot on obstetrics and gynaecology, that the poverty was grinding and the education system appalling, that if you were poor you couldn't get an epidural and that if you were homosexual you had to leave . . . for a non-Catholic town, obviously.

At that time Catholic towns were kind of quiet because the Catholic priority was that women should have as many babies as humanly . . . or inhumanly . . . possible. It was not the priority of a Catholic town to provide those babies with a job, or a health service, or functioning fire engines, or indeed, a hope in hell. Perhaps this might be an explanation as to why Mr Monaghan spent his childhood in a non-Catholic society. Although, as the British newspapers continually say of Mr Monaghan, he was "raised by nuns." All we can say is that those nuns did a hell of a good job . . . and not for the first time.

In brief, it is interesting for an Irish person, emerging from a society where the Catholic church was the most powerful institution, to look at an American person who wants to build a Catholic society in, as it were, a laboratory environment. Mr Monaghan wants a town without pornography, without birth control or divorce (and it is fascinating how those three are lumped together), after years spent living at the heart of western capitalism. And we talk about the delusions of Muslim fundamentalists.

The Ave Maria project has caused ructions amongst American civil liberties groups, as you may imagine. But I don't think they need to worry. What we must do now is say "Thomas Monaghan, phone home."