What nuns give up when they take their vows..
What nuns give up when they take their vows..
Galatians 3:28 - There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
http://www.sistersofmercy.org/become-a-sister/ask-a-sister/
The name in religion, however, is not a tool for hiding the nun behind a borrowed name, analogous to the veil that used to cover most of her face. Rather, it is a go-between, even a stage name for the performance of religious devotion enacted in a theatre hidden behind the convent walls.
Nuns themselves testify to the importance of receiving a new name. According to Josette, "You change your name along with your clothing; they go together. You leave behind your old clothes and your baptismal name! The new habit has to go with the new name and it's dramatic, a major break with your previous life."[34] For Sister Madeleine, who works with poor and dispossessed families in Toulouse, "the important thing is the call that you can't ignore.
I chose the name Madeleine because I felt a special empathy for the patron saint of sinners, but that's not really what's important. I had a life before, I liked boys, but you have to choose, give up things, and it's not easy.
Long after taking the veil, women recall intensely their renaming, and they offer emotional accounts of their transformation. They remember entering the religious life as about making choices, about the conscious renunciation of what previously defined their lives in response to an interior voice.
Describing the new name as a "pseudonym" seems inadequate to capture their experience. Early modern texts similarly bind leaving behind family, ordinary clothes, and name into an indivisible ensemble: "Leave behind vain ornaments with a holy scorn, because you want nothing more to do with the vanity of the world; drop them all in obedience to the baptismal vow that you took to renounce the world and its vanity and that you have perhaps not yet fulfilled."
Prescriptive texts denounce the frivolity and coquetry of secular clothing; its rejection becomes a technique for the denial of the body. Entering the convent, a young woman leaves her old clothes at the door along with the name that at her baptism had brought her into the larger Christian family:
The records of veilings and professions kept by the Sisters of Notre Dame in Carentan, a post-Tridentine teaching order, reveal trends in eighteenth-century religious naming practices. Fifty-one novices took the veil between 1737 and 1783. Of these, thirteen incorporated a masculine name into their religious name, perhaps out of respect for the dictates of the Council of Trent, which condemned the feminization of the names of male exemplars of piety.
The most common female names suggest that the novices regularly drew on the era's most common devotional literature in their choice of name Christological devotion was a dominant influence, with the overwhelming majority of new names combining a saint's name with a reference to Jesus or to the holy sacrament.The cults of Mary and the angels appear in second place, with eight and seven appearances respectively. Saint Joseph and Pierre Fourrier, one of the order's founders, both appeared once. There were no references to particular dogmas of the Church, but the early fathers and episodes in the life of Christ both showed up occasionally.
This practice of double naming placed the nun under the protection of a specific saint while also linking her to a transcendent form of spirituality, and it suggests a clear process of identity-formation well beyond the simple change of civil status. To be called "Sister Adélaïde de Jésus" or "Colombe du Saint-Sacrement" places the individual within a sacred genealogy that distinguishes her from both ordinary lay people and other religious. It would be interesting to know more about how religious naming reflected the social origins and educational levels of the individuals concerned; the small sample in the Carentan records offers some hints but provides an inadequate basis for generalization.
Clearly, the choice of a name in religion varies both by religious order and across time.
In the nineteenth century, particularly in contemplative orders, the convent hierarchy, usually the mother superior, generally chose names for postulants. At the other extreme were houses that allow novices free choice of a name, although the convent authorities did seek to discourage overly mystical or imaginative names.
This freedom to choose a name is the most common practice in religious houses today. Midway between the two possibilities was a name negotiated between the novice, the mistress of novices and/or the mother superior. Many houses maintained a tradition of having the postulant propose a list from which her superiors made the final choice.
Whether imposed, negotiated, or freely chosen, the new name becomes a fully integrated element of the nun's identity, a process that demands our attention. Rejecting the nineteenth-century notion of taking the veil as a "cowardly retreat" for women incapable of facing the world, J. P. Peterson suggests that we consider their act as "a strong, although unusual, affirmation of the self. It is like a rejection (even a revolt against) a humiliating status, although it takes the form of a radical annihilation of self, an absolute humility, but this time in the name of God alone."
If we follow Peterson's suggestion in our analysis of naming, then the name in religion features as both the symbol and tool of that affirmation. The new name serves not only to identify a specific nun, but to place her both within her new community and with regard to the world that she has left behind. There are many nineteenth-century examples of women who founded religious orders and whose name in religion served them as a sort of standard in their combat for a spiritual ideal. Far from being a peaceful retreat, the convent served these women as a site for the full expression of self.
Some contemporary interviews confirm this reading. Among my interview subjects, some seem to consider their name in religion as conferring a certain social status, although they were not entirely comfortable with this idea. Daughters of modest rural families, they had often experienced their entry into the convent as upward mobility, and their new name was part of this social achievement. Françoise-Thérèse explained in detail the spiritual reasons for her choice of name, including her decision not to return to her baptismal name after Vatican II: "Eliette wasn't a religious name; it was just for family.
Family life and the religious life were two different worlds, and names kept them separate. Records reveal that different orders understood the social significance of naming differently; some carefully followed established rules, while others made more grandiose choices that might draw attention to their recruits' elevated social status.
We know very little about what the secular world, notably political authorities, made of religious names. Even though no text in canon law specifically describes name changing, the French monarchy did regulate the practice beginning in 1736. Royal edict required all monastic orders to keep records of all entries and professions and to turn over one copy to the bailliage clerk every five years.
Religious houses were to record birth names; the edict said nothing of religious names, although some houses listed the latter more prominently than the former. Occasionally, political authorities, even under the Old Regime, objected to the use of religious names on the grounds that they tended to exempt part of the population from the law. At the time of the foundation of Saint-Cyr, Louis XIV required the new order to reject officially any use of religious names.
The Republic has also occasionally confronted religious orders over the question of names, since name-changing could be used for both minor and more serious deception. Finally, it is worth considering that the interplay between naming and identity does not take place exclusively in the written record.
What role did names play in religious life within the convent? We do know something about what nuns called one another. Sometimes rules prescribed naming practices, forbidding, for instance, using "any other name that the one that the order selects."
At Saint-Geniez "the sisters always speak French, refer to one another formally (ne se tutoient point), and do not use any name other than their office or their name in religion." Some sisters in positions of authority or assigned to specific tasks were most commonly referred to by their title or office, a practice that emphasized a place in a hierarchy rather than an individual identity. Use of personal names, in contrast, whether the original name or the religious name, called attention to individuality.
Obituary notices composed by religious communities for their members are also quite revealing about the significance of names.
The Visitandine archives contain many examples of these Abrégés de vie et vertus, usually written by a mother superior to narrate the religious life of the deceased. Their length and detail generally vary according to the deceased nun's social rank or the functions she fulfilled within the community: commemorations of sisters (soeurs de choeur) from good families tended to be long and to present their subjects as spiritual exemplars, while the lives of the less elevated soeurs domestiques could be summarized briefly, with the emphasis on their "willing submission."
Titles and names also feature in convent sisters' relationships with the outside world. Nuns' correspondence – both letters that they wrote and those that they received – is important evidence of how names worked in religious life. In 1690 one M Decomps, a jurist from Bordeaux, addressed a letter to the leaders of the Carmelite Tertiary convent in Toulouse: "Mesdames de St Jehan Mother Superior and de St Jehan-Baptiste, vicar of the convent of the tertiary sisters of Toulouse." Decomps was the convent's legal representative, charged with representing their interests in the world, yet his official report used religious names even though legal acts required family names. In this case, monastic practice trumped public practice. Sometimes official correspondence combined both forms of address. All these practices reveal the largely unregulated complexity of the lives of women with a double identity.
In general, these nuns do not seem to have been conscious of this double identity; some denied that it existed, others that it was in any way complex. The de-individualization that takes place as a woman passes through the novitiate to her final vows goes well beyond the loss of a family name.
The novitiate is a time of reflection on self-renunciation. The novice learns to become part of a community by giving up what makes her an individual, neither thinking nor acting for herself but as a small piece of a greater whole. Her name is the least of what the future nun abandons at the convent gate; she leaves behind her very being, an obligation that explains why many novices experience this as a time of suffering. Refusing the option of leaving before taking vows – which is not painless either – some of my interview subjects who found community life difficult created for themselves a more or less solitary mission outside the convent walls: Madeleine as a prison visitor, for instance, or Marie-Lucien as a village nurse. Others found a way to live in community, either by disappearing into it or by dominating it, but always in the name of God.
Giving up one's name and giving up one's clothes belong to a single tradition of renouncing the world, but monastic approaches to these practices are complex. Vatican II's insistence that neither renunciation was necessary generated a great deal of controversy. The possibility of returning to one's family name and of wearing ordinary clothes radically called into question a long tradition of religious life.
In the course of my interviews, some nuns expressed joy at being able to drop religious names and nuns' habits, both of which they associated with rule-bound formality rather than spiritual value. Others, however, perceived the abandonment of a religious name as a denial of the religious life. Even if they were perfectly willing to give up their habit for ordinary street clothes, they nonetheless understood their name in religion as invested with a certain sanctity. Clothing might be irrelevant to the essence of the religious life, but the name represented the nun's vows and was thus crucial to her engagement in the religious life. For some, the religious name was a marker of the social status they gained by entering the convent; the name gave them dignity in their own eyes and those of others. These multiple positions vis a vis religious names and dress suggest the complexity of the transformation of personal identity undergone by women in the name of a transcendent ideal.
Translated by Carol E. Harrison
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0033.028/--taking-the-veil-clothing-and-the-transformation-of-identity?rgn=main;view=fulltext
The groundbreaking Lifetime® series “The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns” follows five young women considering the life-changing decision of taking religious vows to become Catholic nuns. For the first time ever, cameras were allowed into three convents where the women live and work together alongside nuns during the discernment phase, the process wherein they decide if they want to formally continue on their holy path. In observance of the sacred vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, they leave behind everything they have come to love—boyfriends, family members and all worldly possessions—to see if they have what it takes to become servants of the church and brides of Christ. See them test their devotion when “The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns” premieres Tuesday,
http://www.dove.org/review/10763-the-sisterhood-becoming-nuns/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4257314/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/07/lifetimes-the-sisterhood_n_6263184.html
The Sisterhood Becoming Nuns 2014 Season 1 Episode 2
https://youtu.be/aiKtq3Jf0xQ
Galatians 3:28 - There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
http://www.sistersofmercy.org/become-a-sister/ask-a-sister/
The name in religion, however, is not a tool for hiding the nun behind a borrowed name, analogous to the veil that used to cover most of her face. Rather, it is a go-between, even a stage name for the performance of religious devotion enacted in a theatre hidden behind the convent walls.
Nuns themselves testify to the importance of receiving a new name. According to Josette, "You change your name along with your clothing; they go together. You leave behind your old clothes and your baptismal name! The new habit has to go with the new name and it's dramatic, a major break with your previous life."[34] For Sister Madeleine, who works with poor and dispossessed families in Toulouse, "the important thing is the call that you can't ignore.
I chose the name Madeleine because I felt a special empathy for the patron saint of sinners, but that's not really what's important. I had a life before, I liked boys, but you have to choose, give up things, and it's not easy.
Long after taking the veil, women recall intensely their renaming, and they offer emotional accounts of their transformation. They remember entering the religious life as about making choices, about the conscious renunciation of what previously defined their lives in response to an interior voice.
Describing the new name as a "pseudonym" seems inadequate to capture their experience. Early modern texts similarly bind leaving behind family, ordinary clothes, and name into an indivisible ensemble: "Leave behind vain ornaments with a holy scorn, because you want nothing more to do with the vanity of the world; drop them all in obedience to the baptismal vow that you took to renounce the world and its vanity and that you have perhaps not yet fulfilled."
Prescriptive texts denounce the frivolity and coquetry of secular clothing; its rejection becomes a technique for the denial of the body. Entering the convent, a young woman leaves her old clothes at the door along with the name that at her baptism had brought her into the larger Christian family:
The records of veilings and professions kept by the Sisters of Notre Dame in Carentan, a post-Tridentine teaching order, reveal trends in eighteenth-century religious naming practices. Fifty-one novices took the veil between 1737 and 1783. Of these, thirteen incorporated a masculine name into their religious name, perhaps out of respect for the dictates of the Council of Trent, which condemned the feminization of the names of male exemplars of piety.
The most common female names suggest that the novices regularly drew on the era's most common devotional literature in their choice of name Christological devotion was a dominant influence, with the overwhelming majority of new names combining a saint's name with a reference to Jesus or to the holy sacrament.The cults of Mary and the angels appear in second place, with eight and seven appearances respectively. Saint Joseph and Pierre Fourrier, one of the order's founders, both appeared once. There were no references to particular dogmas of the Church, but the early fathers and episodes in the life of Christ both showed up occasionally.
This practice of double naming placed the nun under the protection of a specific saint while also linking her to a transcendent form of spirituality, and it suggests a clear process of identity-formation well beyond the simple change of civil status. To be called "Sister Adélaïde de Jésus" or "Colombe du Saint-Sacrement" places the individual within a sacred genealogy that distinguishes her from both ordinary lay people and other religious. It would be interesting to know more about how religious naming reflected the social origins and educational levels of the individuals concerned; the small sample in the Carentan records offers some hints but provides an inadequate basis for generalization.
Clearly, the choice of a name in religion varies both by religious order and across time.
In the nineteenth century, particularly in contemplative orders, the convent hierarchy, usually the mother superior, generally chose names for postulants. At the other extreme were houses that allow novices free choice of a name, although the convent authorities did seek to discourage overly mystical or imaginative names.
This freedom to choose a name is the most common practice in religious houses today. Midway between the two possibilities was a name negotiated between the novice, the mistress of novices and/or the mother superior. Many houses maintained a tradition of having the postulant propose a list from which her superiors made the final choice.
Whether imposed, negotiated, or freely chosen, the new name becomes a fully integrated element of the nun's identity, a process that demands our attention. Rejecting the nineteenth-century notion of taking the veil as a "cowardly retreat" for women incapable of facing the world, J. P. Peterson suggests that we consider their act as "a strong, although unusual, affirmation of the self. It is like a rejection (even a revolt against) a humiliating status, although it takes the form of a radical annihilation of self, an absolute humility, but this time in the name of God alone."
If we follow Peterson's suggestion in our analysis of naming, then the name in religion features as both the symbol and tool of that affirmation. The new name serves not only to identify a specific nun, but to place her both within her new community and with regard to the world that she has left behind. There are many nineteenth-century examples of women who founded religious orders and whose name in religion served them as a sort of standard in their combat for a spiritual ideal. Far from being a peaceful retreat, the convent served these women as a site for the full expression of self.
Some contemporary interviews confirm this reading. Among my interview subjects, some seem to consider their name in religion as conferring a certain social status, although they were not entirely comfortable with this idea. Daughters of modest rural families, they had often experienced their entry into the convent as upward mobility, and their new name was part of this social achievement. Françoise-Thérèse explained in detail the spiritual reasons for her choice of name, including her decision not to return to her baptismal name after Vatican II: "Eliette wasn't a religious name; it was just for family.
Family life and the religious life were two different worlds, and names kept them separate. Records reveal that different orders understood the social significance of naming differently; some carefully followed established rules, while others made more grandiose choices that might draw attention to their recruits' elevated social status.
We know very little about what the secular world, notably political authorities, made of religious names. Even though no text in canon law specifically describes name changing, the French monarchy did regulate the practice beginning in 1736. Royal edict required all monastic orders to keep records of all entries and professions and to turn over one copy to the bailliage clerk every five years.
Religious houses were to record birth names; the edict said nothing of religious names, although some houses listed the latter more prominently than the former. Occasionally, political authorities, even under the Old Regime, objected to the use of religious names on the grounds that they tended to exempt part of the population from the law. At the time of the foundation of Saint-Cyr, Louis XIV required the new order to reject officially any use of religious names.
The Republic has also occasionally confronted religious orders over the question of names, since name-changing could be used for both minor and more serious deception. Finally, it is worth considering that the interplay between naming and identity does not take place exclusively in the written record.
What role did names play in religious life within the convent? We do know something about what nuns called one another. Sometimes rules prescribed naming practices, forbidding, for instance, using "any other name that the one that the order selects."
At Saint-Geniez "the sisters always speak French, refer to one another formally (ne se tutoient point), and do not use any name other than their office or their name in religion." Some sisters in positions of authority or assigned to specific tasks were most commonly referred to by their title or office, a practice that emphasized a place in a hierarchy rather than an individual identity. Use of personal names, in contrast, whether the original name or the religious name, called attention to individuality.
Obituary notices composed by religious communities for their members are also quite revealing about the significance of names.
The Visitandine archives contain many examples of these Abrégés de vie et vertus, usually written by a mother superior to narrate the religious life of the deceased. Their length and detail generally vary according to the deceased nun's social rank or the functions she fulfilled within the community: commemorations of sisters (soeurs de choeur) from good families tended to be long and to present their subjects as spiritual exemplars, while the lives of the less elevated soeurs domestiques could be summarized briefly, with the emphasis on their "willing submission."
Titles and names also feature in convent sisters' relationships with the outside world. Nuns' correspondence – both letters that they wrote and those that they received – is important evidence of how names worked in religious life. In 1690 one M Decomps, a jurist from Bordeaux, addressed a letter to the leaders of the Carmelite Tertiary convent in Toulouse: "Mesdames de St Jehan Mother Superior and de St Jehan-Baptiste, vicar of the convent of the tertiary sisters of Toulouse." Decomps was the convent's legal representative, charged with representing their interests in the world, yet his official report used religious names even though legal acts required family names. In this case, monastic practice trumped public practice. Sometimes official correspondence combined both forms of address. All these practices reveal the largely unregulated complexity of the lives of women with a double identity.
In general, these nuns do not seem to have been conscious of this double identity; some denied that it existed, others that it was in any way complex. The de-individualization that takes place as a woman passes through the novitiate to her final vows goes well beyond the loss of a family name.
The novitiate is a time of reflection on self-renunciation. The novice learns to become part of a community by giving up what makes her an individual, neither thinking nor acting for herself but as a small piece of a greater whole. Her name is the least of what the future nun abandons at the convent gate; she leaves behind her very being, an obligation that explains why many novices experience this as a time of suffering. Refusing the option of leaving before taking vows – which is not painless either – some of my interview subjects who found community life difficult created for themselves a more or less solitary mission outside the convent walls: Madeleine as a prison visitor, for instance, or Marie-Lucien as a village nurse. Others found a way to live in community, either by disappearing into it or by dominating it, but always in the name of God.
Giving up one's name and giving up one's clothes belong to a single tradition of renouncing the world, but monastic approaches to these practices are complex. Vatican II's insistence that neither renunciation was necessary generated a great deal of controversy. The possibility of returning to one's family name and of wearing ordinary clothes radically called into question a long tradition of religious life.
In the course of my interviews, some nuns expressed joy at being able to drop religious names and nuns' habits, both of which they associated with rule-bound formality rather than spiritual value. Others, however, perceived the abandonment of a religious name as a denial of the religious life. Even if they were perfectly willing to give up their habit for ordinary street clothes, they nonetheless understood their name in religion as invested with a certain sanctity. Clothing might be irrelevant to the essence of the religious life, but the name represented the nun's vows and was thus crucial to her engagement in the religious life. For some, the religious name was a marker of the social status they gained by entering the convent; the name gave them dignity in their own eyes and those of others. These multiple positions vis a vis religious names and dress suggest the complexity of the transformation of personal identity undergone by women in the name of a transcendent ideal.
Translated by Carol E. Harrison
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/w/wsfh/0642292.0033.028/--taking-the-veil-clothing-and-the-transformation-of-identity?rgn=main;view=fulltext
The groundbreaking Lifetime® series “The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns” follows five young women considering the life-changing decision of taking religious vows to become Catholic nuns. For the first time ever, cameras were allowed into three convents where the women live and work together alongside nuns during the discernment phase, the process wherein they decide if they want to formally continue on their holy path. In observance of the sacred vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, they leave behind everything they have come to love—boyfriends, family members and all worldly possessions—to see if they have what it takes to become servants of the church and brides of Christ. See them test their devotion when “The Sisterhood: Becoming Nuns” premieres Tuesday,
http://www.dove.org/review/10763-the-sisterhood-becoming-nuns/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4257314/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/07/lifetimes-the-sisterhood_n_6263184.html
The Sisterhood Becoming Nuns 2014 Season 1 Episode 2
https://youtu.be/aiKtq3Jf0xQ
Comments
Post a Comment