Early in the formative years of religious life, in my order as well as others I am familiar with, you are invited to pray and submit three names that will then be discerned to be your religious name. This is both an exciting and daunting time—this is the new name you will be known by for the rest of your life. It takes much prayer, guidance, and reliance on the Holy Spirit. There is a certain amount of grief in saying goodbye to your old name, and it takes a lot of trust to embrace your new one. Just as prophets, Jesus with Peter, new popes, or members of other religious orders realize they also receive a new mission with their new name given by God.
Many of the religious Saints experienced this in their own novitiates—Saint Maximilian Kolbe’s baptismal name was Raymond, and Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s was Agnes. Saint Edith Stein, however, is unique—I would wager to say more people recognize her by her given and baptismal name of Edith than her religious name: Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.
Saint Edith Stein has a tremendous journey of conversion (which you can read more about here and here). It’s easy to surmise why she would have chosen Teresa as her religious name—it was an encounter with Saint Teresa of Avila’s autobiography that led Edith from atheism to Catholicism. But why the rest? Why did she submit Benedicta of the Cross?
What's in a Name?
Names have meaning. When my fellow Sisters and I were discerning our religious names, our founder encouraged us to look at the meaning of the names we were choosing, not just the Saint’s life and virtue. He encouraged us to live the meaning of our name. Edith means “riches” or “blessed.” So she did not stray too far from her birth name by adding Benedicta, which also means blessed. Instead of being blessed by riches, she embraces and accepts being blessed by the Cross.
I think part of the reason she embraced her title of being blessed by the Cross was because she understood the gift of her own femininity and the call of each woman, whether physically or spiritually, to mother. She understood that the ability to mother is intimately linked to the ability to love. To love means to embrace an encounter with the Cross in some form. An encounter with the Cross is an invitation to an encounter with Christ. Her writings—particularly her Essays on Woman, found in the second volume of her collected works—reflect this. She says:
“The innermost formative principle of woman’s soul is the love which flows from the divine heart” (Ch. I).
The deeper the image of God penetrates into us, the more it awakens our love” (Ch. VII).
Surrender to Christ does not make us blind and deaf to the needs of others—on the contrary. We now seek for God’s image in each human being and want, above all, to help each human being win his freedom” (Ch. VII).
Only in daily, confidential relationship with the Lord in the tabernacle can one forget self, become free of all one’s own wishes and pretentions, and have a heart open to all the needs and wants of others” (Ch. I).
To be developed in its full sense, maternity must be interpreted as supernatural as well as natural” (Ch. VI).
Love: An Encounter with the Cross
She also understood that the blessing of the Cross was not just in intense suffering (as she faced at the end of her life in Auschwitz) but also in the day-to-day ordinariness of life:
“The one who decides for marriage will know that she must persevere; she must struggle during her entire life to guide to completion the image of God in her husband and herself” (Ch. VI).
“A woman herself must stand firmly; however, this is possible only if inwardly everything is in right order and rests in equilibrium” (Ch. VII).
“Transcendence over natural limitations is the highest effect of grace; however, this can never be attained by an arbitrary battle against nature and by denial of natural limitations but only through humble submission to the God given order” (Ch. II).
“The person’s nature and his life’s course are no gift or trick of chance, but—seen with the eyes of faith—the work of God” (Ch. II).
Sharing in the Sufferings of Christ
This last quote takes on a haunting clarity of her trust in the Lord as she experienced the turmoil of her country and culture during the prewar and war years of World War II. When she entered the Carmelites in 1933, she said:
"Human activities cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it" (source).
The day-to-day crosses she embraced as part of her life’s course gave her the strength to persevere amid her living martyrdom of the last years of her life. Raised Jewish, she faced the terror of the persecution of her people. Out of fear for her Carmelite Sisters due to her Jewish heritage, she was smuggled to a convent in the Netherlands, but was eventually arrested and transported to Auschwitz. She could see what was ahead of her and embraced it with love:
"[I] have said with all my heart: 'Ave, Crux, Spec Unica' ('Hail Cross our only hope')" (source).
Saint Edith Stein, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, pray for us that we, too, may see the blessing of the Cross.
Sr. Mary Claire of the Holy Family is a member of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT) and currently serves in Corpus Christi, TX. She loves Jesus and Mary, and her students would say every Saint is her favorite. She graduated with a degree in elementary education and is currently working on a Masters in Theology from her Alma Mater, Franciscan University. A Tennessee girl who could live off Dr. Pepper and popcorn, she loves road trips, especially this one we are on to Heaven.
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