IMMOKALEE, Fla. • Near the magnificent new church on the Ave Maria University campus, sculptor Marton Varo chips away at 80 tons of the best white marble money can buy, direct from the same Italian quarry where Michelangelo used to get his marble.

The $3 million, 35-foot-tall bas-relief sculpture depicts The Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel tells the Virgin Mary she will bear the son of God. The work will someday adorn the facade of the 10-story Ave Maria Oratory, around which a modern campus and college town have materialized in quick time on the edge of the Florida Everglades.

The recession has a stranglehold on much of southwest Florida, but billionaire Thomas Monaghan’s vision for the 1,100-seat church and the Roman Catholic school he created continues to take shape, even if construction isn’t progressing as quickly as he had hoped.

The 72-year-old founder of the Domino’s Pizza chain had hoped to have a gym built for the basketball team by now. He and the town’s developer also expected to see more than the 300 or so houses and condos that have gone up, and more restaurants and stores open in the town center surrounding the towering church.

And plans to erect one of the largest freestanding crucifixes in the world – 65 feet tall, with a 40-foot body of Christ – on the church grounds had to be put on hold.

“Our timing has been terrible,” Monaghan said during an interview in his office in the university library, a copper-roofed structure in the classic Frank Lloyd Wright style he favors. “But we’re pretty well-heeled, so we’re able to absorb it, and we just cut back.”

Considering these were far-flung fields of tomatoes and sod just three years ago, there has been great progress. Monaghan, who holds the title of university chancellor, figures he’s put more than $400 million of his pizza fortune into developing what he likes to call a “spiritual military academy” amid a new town steeped in conservative Catholic teaching and symbolism.

Monaghan made headlines before the first shovel of dirt was turned, saying that stores in Ave Maria would be prohibited from selling contraceptives and pornography, and the cable TV system wouldn’t carry adult movies. He backed off after civil rights advocates raised a stink, but says he hopes those things will remain unavailable here.

A large classroom building, library, three residence halls and student union with dining hall accommodate 697 students this year, up from 367 when the doors opened in fall 2007. School officials say enrollment could top 900 this fall.

Another large dorm is under construction on the 1½-square-mile campus, and in the next few years the gym and another student union/classroom building will go up. An arts center, administration building and auditorium are all on the drawing board. An affiliated law school scheduled to open in Naples this fall eventually will relocate to the campus.

The effects of the sagging economy are evident, though, in the vacant lots and unfinished streets around the campus, where about 1,000 residents have moved into houses whose starting prices have dipped to the low $100,000s. And plenty of storefronts are empty in the quiet, Italian-inspired town center.

But a trendy coffeehouse called The Bean is open. So is a smoothie bar, jewelry store, bike shop, florist, medical clinic and dentist’s office. And a sure sign of civilization in Florida – a Publix grocery store – is under construction a block away on Pope John Paul II Boulevard.

The church has become a minor tourist attraction, competing with the glitzy Seminole Indian casino 15 minutes away in Immokalee.

Monaghan and developer Barron Collier Cos., which donated the land for the campus to persuade him to build here, say they still believe Ave Maria will grow in the next two decades to fulfill initial expectations: 5,500 students living in a bustling town of 25,000 residents.

Beekeeper Andy Westrich of Hampton, Va., removed a comb-filled frame from a hive in April. Photo by McClatchy Newspapers