Daniel COSACCHI. Great American Prophets: Pope Francis’s Models of Christian Life, Foreword by Kerry Alys Robinson. New York: Paulist Press, 2022. Pp. xix + 163. $29.95 pb. ISBN 978-0-8091-5572-9. Reviewed by Patrick F. O’CONNELL, Gannon University, Erie, PA 16541.

            Daniel Cosacchi, currently Vice President for Mission and Ministry at the University of Scranton, has conceived and carried out the attractive project of considering the “Four Great Americans” highlighted by Pope Francis in his address to the US Congress on September 24, 2015 as exemplifying key themes and values of the pope’s own vision and as models for contemporary American Catholics generally. The result is both informative and inspirational.

            Following an admiring Foreword by Kerry Robinson, founding director of the Leadership Roundtable, the book consists of a Preface, an Introduction and six relatively brief chapters. The Preface (ix-xvi) focuses on Francis himself, as the author reminisces on his own experience as a graduate student processing the unexpected result of the election of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, with the choice of his name and patron as signaling the triple focus of his pontificate and its prophetic dimensions: the preferential option for the poor, the commitment to non-violence and the crucial necessity to care for creation.

Having distinguished the vocation of the prophet from that of the partisan “culture warrior” in this Preface, Cosacchi then provides in his Introduction (1-13) a summary overview of the multivalent preaching of the classical or “writing” prophets in the Hebrew scriptures, with particular attention to the denunciation of social injustice in Amos and the depiction of the reign of shalom shared by Micah and Isaiah. These same themes are discovered in the message of Jesus and in prophetic figures throughout subsequent Christian history, as described by theologian Walter Brueggeman in his classic book The Prophetic Imagination and as represented in the present day by such witnesses as the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero in Latin America (canonized by Francis in 2018) and Daniel Berrigan in the United States. The author concludes this preliminary survey by pointing out that there is a prophetic dimension to the vocation of every baptized Christian, who shares in the identity of Christ as prophet, priest and king.

The first four numbered chapters are devoted to each of the particular Americans singled out by Francis in his address. As the author had noted earlier (xiv), his approach is not one of simply providing biographical sketches or limiting himself to the pope’s explicit comments on each one (which are seldom quoted or directly referenced by Cosacchi), but develops wider connections between the pope and his chosen models by drawing both on major writings from throughout the decade of Francis’ pontificate and on key “prophetic” elements exemplified in each person’s life and work.

The discussion of Lincoln (15-32) focuses particularly on the Emancipation Proclamation and its effects, but manages to incorporate commentary on a wide variety of relevant aspects of his career, including his mutually admiring friendship with abolitionist, author and ex-slave Frederick Douglass, his ambiguity, and perhaps initial ambivalence, regarding universal emancipation, his unenlightened attitudes toward Native Americans, the “sacred effort” (as described by Douglass) of the Second Inaugural (27) – but perhaps surprisingly, no notice of Lincoln’s efforts in the final weeks of his life to complete the process of complete abolition through his championing of what would become the thirteenth amendment. It also considers the Proclamation as in some sense an early parallel to key principles of Catholic Social Teaching, such as the common good, solidarity and subsidiarity, and even of liberation theology; provides a survey of the Church’s own changing stance on slavery; presents Lincoln as a pontifex or “bridge builder,” a key element of leadership for Pope Francis; and compares issue of abortion with that of slavery, drawing on the nuanced, non-polemical approaches of moral theologians Julie Hanlon Rubio and Richard McCormick (some consideration of the consistent ethic of life position of Eileen Egan, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and Daniel Berrigan, among others, would have been pertinent here as well).

            The following chapter (33-50) on the second “Great American,” Martin Luther King, of course segues smoothly from what preceded, symbolized by the delivery of his most famous speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. But Cosacchi begins his discussion with reference to the Kings Bay Plowshares anti-nuclear action, in which seven white Catholic activists symbolically “disarmed” weapons of mass destruction, citing the witness of King as well as of Isaiah and Pope Francis in explaining their protest. King is presented as adhering to the principles of non-violence in the three-fold areas of racial injustice, economic exploitation and war; his teaching on disinterested agape love, love as self-gift as distinguished from eros and philia, is highlighted, as well as its controversial aspects among advocates of black power and black theology who questioned its psychological and social effects. Cosacchi sees King as a forerunner of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, and notes the failure of religious authorities, particularly the American Catholic hierarchy, to embody gospel principles (referring to the sexual abuse scandal as evidence), and its relative lack of leadership in the contemporary movement for racial justice (the pertinent parallel with King’s critique of white ecclesial leadership in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” could have provided a further link here). The chapter concludes with King’s four-fold program of education, employment, empowerment through exercise of political and societal rights, and housing as still calling for effective advocacy and implementation today.

            Cosacchi’s chapter on Dorothy Day highlights three areas intrinsic to the Catholic Worker movement as articulated and exemplified by the woman whom Cosacchi, quoting historian David O’Brien, calls “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of American Catholicism” (51) and likewise evident in the teaching of Francis himself.  First is the issue of workers’ rights, a prophetic denunciation of exploitation, mistreatment and injustice toward the poor and powerless, complemented by the annunciation of the dignity of labor, particularly manual labor, symbolized vividly in the iconic photograph of Dorothy Day sitting in the fields with California farm workers, about to be arrested by the two police officers who frame the picture. Second is her active nonviolence and defense of the oppressed, a consistent, unyielding commitment to the gospel of peace in all circumstances, not mentioned specifically by the pope in his address but an important part of his own teaching as well, as Cosacchi later emphasizes (see 120-21); and finally what comes to be called by Francis “integral ecology,” what CW co-founder Peter Maurin referred to as the Green Revolution. All this is integrated in the personalist philosophy articulated most prominently by Jacques Maritain, which grounds authentic identity in relationship, not only to other persons but to all living creatures and to creation itself, the central theme in the pope’s own encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,” which Cosacchi believes shows “Day’s influence all over” it (66) – unsourced and arguably overstated but certainly indicating a shared outlook.

            Finally, Cosacchi turns to Thomas Merton (71-88), the last of the pope’s quartet of Great Americans, who is presented not just as the Catholic convert of his famous autobiography but as a model for ongoing conversion, evident above all in his almost equally famous “epiphany” in downtown Louisville in March 1958, when he recognizes his love for, unity with and responsibility toward the entire human community (see 81-82). The author also draws on his own Jesuit educational background to hold up Merton as a model of the integration of contemplation and action put forward by St. Ignatius. As a person of prayer and a person of dialogue, Merton too serves as a pontifex, a bridge builder, potentially and in fact between different factions of the Church itself (though Cosacchi overlooks ways in which Merton in his own lifetime and even down to the present, has often been, as prophets not seldom are, a sign of contradiction); among the world’s religions; and between believers and non-believers. The image is especially effective in this context because it recalls the presence of one of Merton’s books in the backpack of civil rights activist and future Congressman John Lewis (present in Francis’s audience at the capitol) as he was beaten at Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965 (misprinted 1956, one of the very few errata in the book).

At this point one might note that certain issues relative to the framework of his discussion of these role models would benefit from more explicit clarification. Though he writes of “Pope Francis’s invocation of four great Americans as prophetic” (7), in fact the pope never refers to his models as prophetic or prophets – words which do not occur anywhere in his address. This does not mean the terms are inappropriate or inapplicable (though in the case of Lincoln, working “within the system” and having at times to compromise in order to accomplish his goals are uncharacteristic of the prophetic role, though his soaring scriptural rhetoric often has a prophetic ring to it). But the author needs to make clear that this specific identification is his own, rather than that of Francis, and at least briefly to explain why he finds this characterization helpful and relevant in communicating the pope’s message.  

Conversely, he neglects information relevant to his discussion that the pope does include. Cosacchi frequently calls attention to his efforts to “try to answer the question of why Francis chose the four figures he did” (xiv). But Francis had explicitly noted in his address at least the ostensible reason for looking at these four figures: “My visit takes place at a time when men and women of good will are marking the anniversaries of several great Americans.” The year 2015 commemorated the one-hundred fiftieth anniversary of the death of Lincoln, the fiftieth anniversary of the historical Selma-to-Birmingham march of King and his fellow advocates for racial justice; the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Merton; and presumably the thirty-fifth anniversary of the death of Day (Francis in fact omits to mention how the present date relates to her!). Cosacchi (like many other commentators on the address) overlooks this statement of the pope, highlighting only the Birmingham march but not noting its relevance to the pope’s stated rationale for remembering King at this particular time. (In the case of Merton, in particular, it explains the reason why the pope quotes from the opening paragraph of The Seven Storey Mountain, which has little if anything to do with the specific phrase “loving God and yet hating Him” that Cosacchi makes the main focus of his discussion of this passage and that in context clearly refers not simply to  Merton individually but to the general state of fallen, sinful humanity.) Of course this commemorative aspect is an explanation only on one level of why these particular figures are grouped together. The deeper, more intrinsic search for why they are to be considered “great Americans,” persons who, in the pope’s own words, “shaped fundamental values which will endure forever in the spirit of the American people,” is one in which Francis engages briefly and Cosacchi rightly and helpfully develops in greater detail in his four central chapters. But this should be a development of, rather than a replacement for, the rationale Francis himself provides in terms of his particular choices.

Unexpectedly, perhaps, the completion of this set of reflections on the quartet of “Great Americans” does not in fact mark the end of Cosacchi’s response to Pope Francis’s historic address. The book’s penultimate chapter, “Prophecy for Our Country and Time” (89-103), expands the scope of the discussion to propose nine further models of prophetic witness, all women, who “align with Francis’s outlook on the United States as he expressed in his own list” (91). They include three Catholic religious: death penalty abolitionist Sr. Helen Prejean, migrant advocate and caregiver Sr. Norma Pimentel and peacemaker and racial justice spokesperson Sr. Patricia Chappell; four laypersons, all (like Chappell) persons of color: filmmaker Ava DuVernay, #MeToo founder Tarana Burke, feminist and abolitionist Sojourner Truth and Cherokee chief Wilma Mankiller; and two influential academics, feminist and ecological theologian Sr. Elizabeth Johnson and Hong King-born post-colonial theologian Kwok Pui-Lan. These figures are representative of myriad others who continue to challenge and encourage the American Catholic community to incarnate the message of the gospels. While all these are certainly admirable models, the selection has certain elements of awkwardness that may detract from its complete effectiveness. One wonders, for instance, why the mid-nineteenth-century activist Sojourner Truth is inserted into a list of otherwise contemporary figures. The initial two figures have had a personal connection with Francis, which sets them apart from the rest of the group to some extent. Initially the author makes explicit connections between the specific kinds of witness of his choices and that of the pope’s four figures, but as he progresses these links tend to become more implicit than emphasized. Finally, the exclusively female composition of the group, while understandable in the context of the underrepresentation of women leaders in the Church (somewhat less so, perhaps, since the book was written), may strike readers as overcompensating and less representative than at least a mix, if not an even balance, of women and men. For example the inclusion of Homeboy Industries founder Fr. Gregory Boyle (quoted on pp. 109-10), whose work with gang members certainly aligns with the vision of Pope Francis, or of fellow Jesuit James Martin, popular spiritual writer (much influenced by Merton) and prominent advocate for sexual minorities in the Church whose work has been recognized and praised by the Pope (cited in an extensive endnote on pp. 132-33) would certainly fit in well with the women Cosacchi features. 

  In the final chapter, “Becoming Great Americans” (105-23), Cosacchi encourages his readers to aim for greatness themselves, not in the sense of fame or reputation but rather the choice of a life of fidelity to the person and teaching of Christ, a commitment to “the least of these” served in the works of mercy enumerated in Matthew 25, a response to the challenge of St. Paul to the Corinthians that settling for worldly greatness and glory makes such Christians “of all people most to be pitied” (114). Drawing on personal models from his own experience along with teachings of Jesuit liberation theologians Jon Sobrino and his friend, the martyred Ignacio Ellacuria, Cosacchi urges contemporary American Catholics to dedicate themselves to the building of what Pope Francis calls a “Church which is poor and for the poor” and suggests ten steps to making this dream a reality, including working for the common good, advocating for families, for the elderly and for the young, maintaining hope and working for reconciliation and healing, for peace and for justice, especially for the marginalized and excluded, “dreaming big” and transcending divisions and misunderstandings, through dialogue and through prayer, personal and communal, prayer that prompts and pervades action with and for the wider community. Ultimately, “Pope Francis’s Models of Christian Life,” as the subtitle has it, are not simply to be admired but to be emulated. Cosacchi’s thoughtful reflections are filled with valuable insights that illuminate the responsibilities and challenges of authentic discipleship exemplified here, but also serve to provide compelling invitations to himself and his readers to go and do likewise.