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April 4, 2008, Naples News, Ave Maria drawing flocks of tourists, by Liam Dillon.

Town’s newly dedicated oratory brings in visitors The dedication mass of the Ave Maria Oratory.

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They come from places like Batavia, Ill.; Jim Thorpe, Pa.; and Sligo, Ireland, with cameras banded around their necks and mouths agape.

Tourists from all around the world are trekking the 35 miles from downtown Naples to the hinterlands of eastern Collier County on a journey to see a 100-foot-tall church, a new university and the early results of pizza-man Tom Monaghan’s dream.

By doing so, they’re becoming part of the 600 million people worldwide who take religious tourism trips each year, according to statistics from the United Nations World Tourism Organization.

“It’s definitely an attraction at this point,” said Tony Almeida, the public relations director for the local concierge association.

Ave Maria, religious travel experts said, could become a type of hybrid destination in religious travel terms, combining elements of both pilgrimage (think Lourdes, France) and tourist attraction (think Orlando-based biblical theme park Holy Land Experience).

Similar pilgrimage-attraction hybrids exist in towns such as Eureka Springs, Ark., and Lancaster, Pa., but neither of them is a Catholic destination.

“It is possibly the only Catholic place that offers this particular type of atmosphere and attraction,” said Kevin J. Wright, president of the Colorado-based World Religious Travel Association and author of The Christian Travel Planner.

Right now, the pendulum is swinging more to the side of attraction than pilgrimage, where a holy site’s religious meaning takes precedence, Wright said.

Ave Maria University doesn’t keep statistics on tourists who visit the town, but numbers could well be in the high hundreds each day, according to Jack Rook, the university’s hospitality and tour coordinator. Rook said the university offers narrated tours six times a day, with an average of 30 to 40 people on each tour. That figure, Rook said, represents a small percentage of the visitors. By late afternoon on a recent weekday, 83 lines of the guestbook in the town’s church — known as Ave Maria Oratory — were filled, with many of the lines listing more than one tourist.

The majority of the visitors, townspeople said, are day-trippers from other spots in Southwest Florida, but they originate from across the world.

Jeanne Rush, owner of the town’s women’s clothing boutique, said a co-worker took a look at her mailing list and said, “It looks like the United Nations.”

Stepping out of the church on an afternoon this week, people list various reasons for coming to Ave Maria.

They’re drawn by the idea.

“We’re not Catholic, we’re Protestant, but we think this Monaghan knows what to do with his money,” said Ed Penner, 76, visiting with his wife from Fort Myers and son and daughter-in-law from Manitoba, Canada.

They’re drawn by the design.

“It’s like a little Italy,” said Maggie DeLellis, 71, visiting with her husband from Cape Coral and sister from Hungary.

They’re drawn by proximity to other attractions.

“We went to the casino,” laughed Kathy Smith, 65, a snowbird from New York visiting with 11 others, referring to the Immokalee gambling spot seven miles away. “We’ve been wanting to see this for so long, and the driver was willing to stop.”

And some are drawn by, yes, spirituality.

“I will return to this beautiful place so that God and I can find each other again,” wrote a visitor from Naples in the oratory’s guest book.

All the motivations are familiar to Tom Bremer, an associate professor of religious studies at Rhodes College in Tennessee, who has written extensively about religious tourism. He calls the different ways people react to religious sites such as Ave Maria, the “simultaneity of places.”

People visit Ave Maria with a religious intent or for sightseeing and shopping but likely have some mixture of the two or even the opposite of what they had intended.

“There are people that go there for a specific religious purpose and then wind up having more of a tourist experience,” Bremer said.

Catholics, Bremer said, likely have different reactions to Ave Maria than people of other faiths. Elements of nostalgia and curiosity are also at play.

“A lot of reasons why people visit any destination, in the vernacular of the day, is just ‘buzz,’ ” he said.

Any of Ave Maria’s “buzz” would come from the celebrity of Monaghan, the ambition of the project and the national media attention the town received. And even though much has been spent to market Ave Maria, little is specifically dedicated to tourism. The developer’s play for tourism dollars so far is limited to placing advertisements in Southwest Florida hotel guidebooks and making sure Ave Maria is labeled on Naples-area maps.

Local tourism officials said it was too soon to know what impact the town, which opened in July, would have on tourism.

“From our perspective, we really have not seen much impact to date,” said Jack Wert, executive director of the Naples, Marco Island, Everglades Convention and Visitors Bureau. “It’s a little too early to tell at this point if the university or the church and sanctuary are going to have some appeal to people traveling in the area.”

What could impact that appeal was the dedication this week of the town’s 100-foot-tall structure as a Roman Catholic church. Religious tourism experts said the dedication would not mean much to casual visitors to the town but could eventually lead to stronger religious encounters.

“If they go to the campus and the building and they have these powerful religious experiences and the word spreads, I can see this as being a popular destination for religious tourists,” Bremer said. “If they’re not having these experiences, (the church) would likely just be another pretty building in the Florida landscape. It will be interesting to see what the future holds.”

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