The Name That Changes Everything: What Religious Naming Reveals About Identity, Mission, and the Psychology of Transformation

When a Catholic woman religious receives a new name at profession, something profound happens at the intersection of theology and psychology. The National Catholic Register recently featured four Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville sharing how they received their names, and the story opens a window into one of the most underexplored dimensions of spiritual formation: the role of named identity in psychological and vocational flourishing.

The article, anchored by the witness of Sister Mara Grace Gore, vocations director for the Nashville Dominicans, is brief in its scope but wide in its implication. Each sister describes a process that is at once intimate and ecclesial, personal and communal, spontaneous and steeped in tradition. What unfolds across those four testimonies is not merely a curiosity about Catholic custom. It is a portrait of how naming functions as a mechanism of interior transformation.

Identity Is Not Found. It Is Received.

Contemporary psychology has long recognized that identity formation is a process, not an event. Erik Erikson's foundational work on psychosocial development frames identity as something constructed through relationship, conflict, and resolution across the lifespan (Erikson, 1968). Narrative psychology, particularly the work of Dan McAdams, extends this further: human beings are story-making creatures who locate themselves in time through the plots they inherit and compose.

What the Catholic tradition of religious naming does, viewed through this lens, is extraordinary. It does not merely add a label. It inscribes the individual into a larger story, one that precedes her birth and extends beyond her death. The name of a saint, a mystery, a title of the Virgin, or a theological concept becomes a kind of lifelong vocation within a vocation.

This is identity received rather than constructed, and that distinction matters enormously in the current landscape of mental health discourse. At a moment when questions of identity have become both politically fraught and psychologically destabilizing for many, the Catholic model offers something countercultural: a framework in which the self is not the primary author of its own meaning but a participant in a meaning that transcends the individual altogether.

The Naming Ritual as Therapeutic Structure

Clinical work consistently demonstrates that ritual carries therapeutic weight. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep's classic analysis of rites of passage identified three phases: separation, liminality, and incorporation (van Gennep, 1909/1960). Naming ceremonies in religious life map cleanly onto this structure. The candidate separates from her former social identity, enters a liminal period of formation, and is then incorporated into the community through the reception of her new name.

What this creates, in psychological terms, is a structured container for transformation. Uncertainty, which is inherently anxiety-producing, is held within a form that the community recognizes and honors. The novice does not navigate her identity transition alone. She is accompanied by a community, a tradition, a spiritual director, and ultimately by the name itself as a kind of ongoing companion and invitation.

Research on self-concept clarity offers a particularly useful lens here. People with a well-defined, internally consistent sense of who they are report lower anxiety, greater emotional stability, and stronger psychological well-being (Campbell et al., 1996). Religious naming accelerates self-concept clarity by anchoring identity not in shifting feelings or social feedback but in a stable, externally conferred vocation. The name does not fluctuate. The sister grows into it.

What This Means for the Wider Conversation on Faith and Wellness

The story the National Catholic Register tells about four sisters and their names is, at one level, a beautiful piece of human interest journalism. At another level, it is a case study in how the Catholic tradition has been quietly practicing what positive psychology is only now beginning to theorize: that identity, narrative, community, and transcendent purpose are not supplementary to human flourishing but constitutive of it.

For practitioners working in Catholic mental health, spiritual direction, pastoral counseling, or faith-based wellness, this story offers a reminder that the Church's formational practices contain wisdom that deserves serious intellectual engagement. The naming ceremony is not folklore. It is a structurally sophisticated intervention in the formation of human identity, one that operates simultaneously on personal, relational, communal, and transcendent registers.

The question is not only what is in a religious name. The question is what becomes possible when the human person understands herself as fundamentally a named creature, called forth into her own depths by a voice she did not generate but has learned, slowly and gratefully, to recognize.

References

Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P. D., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M., Lavallee, L. F., & Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 141–156. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.70.1.141

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. W. W. Norton & Company.

van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)