Worthy of Nothing, Not Even Life: Life Under Narcissistic Catholic Religious Leaders

When a religious sister or brother takes a vow of obedience, the promise cuts in both directions: the community member promises to follow, and the superior promises to lead with the patience, attentiveness, and fraternal care that the Catholic Church’s Code of Canon Law explicitly requires. A new qualitative study from Slovakia now documents what happens when the second half of that bargain fails, revealing in unprecedented psychological detail how narcissistic leadership operates inside Catholic religious orders and how deeply it wounds the people who live under it. The study, published in Pastoral Psychology by Sofia Dúbravská and Peter Halama of the University of Trnava, is among the first empirical investigations to move the well-established literature on narcissistic leadership out of the corporate office and into the cloister, where the power dynamics between leader and follower are fused with sacred obligation and cannot be escaped by simply resigning.

The research team recruited ten members of religious congregations in Slovakia, seven women and three men aged 27 to 61, with an average of 21 years of communal life behind them. Participation was open to anyone who believed a former superior had exhibited narcissistic traits, and the researchers were deliberately careful about what they did and did not claim: no formal diagnostic assessment of any superior was attempted, because the study’s phenomenological design focused on lived experience rather than clinical classification. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews averaging 36 minutes, conducted between December 2024 and February 2025, and analysed with the consensual qualitative research framework developed by Hill and colleagues. That method requires a research team to work collaboratively through three analytic stages, organising responses into broad domains, extracting core ideas that summarise each participant’s essential meaning, and then performing a cross-analysis to identify patterns across interviews, all under the scrutiny of an external auditor who verifies the accuracy of the categorisations. The interview protocol was built directly from established theoretical conceptualisations of narcissistic leadership, probing five behavioural territories in turn: manipulative behaviour, lack of empathy, excessive need for admiration, difficulty accepting feedback, and the capacity for charisma and innovative vision.

The analysis yielded five principal manifestations of narcissistic leadership within the orders, and the most comprehensive was manipulative behaviour. Participants described superiors who exerted excessive control over even trivial decisions, hollowing out any sense of personal autonomy; who convinced members with emotional arguments, deploying personal guilt as an instrument of influence; and who subtly replaced members’ own opinions with the leader’s. Less frequent but more severe tactics included using others purely for the leader’s benefit and, strikingly, religious manipulation, in which the superior’s will was presented as divine. The researchers argue that this last tactic represents a distinctively religious transformation of familiar workplace manipulation. Because canon law and tradition frame the superior as, in a sense, representing the voice of God, and because the vowed commitment to obedience creates a structural vulnerability, a narcissistic superior can recontextualise ordinary domineering demands within a spiritual framework, appealing to divine guidance that the leader claims to exercise over subordinates. Criticism, by the same logic, can be reframed as a spiritual failure of the critic rather than a legitimate objection.

The remaining categories mirrored findings from organisational psychology with unsettling fidelity. Nonempathetic and selfish behaviour appeared as a lack of interest in members’ feelings and needs, the unilateral enforcement of the superior’s own plans without discussion, the claiming of credit for other people’s ideas, and the sidelining of collaborative structures. Demands for admiration were sometimes indirect, communicated through an expectant attitude, and sometimes baldly explicit, with the superior constantly highlighting their own achievements; for some leaders, admiration functioned as the very condition of a relationship, determining how much attention a member would receive. Reactions to feedback exposed the fragility beneath the grandiosity: the most common defence was turning against the critic, often with retaliation, alongside acute sensitivity, anger at dissent, insincerity, and an offended reserve in which the superior simply withdrew from communication. Yet the fifth category complicated the picture in a way that surprised even the researchers. Nearly every participant also credited their superior with a genuine ability to generate innovative ideas, often viewed as positive and community-building, coupled with a persuasive charisma that could mobilise support even for initiatives that caused internal tension.

The emotional toll documented in the second domain was severe. Anger and sadness were the most prevalent responses, each reported by six of the ten participants, and neither was described as fleeting. The anger was a deep resentment born of being forced into actions against one’s conscience, while the sadness carried a loss of trust in a figure from whom spiritual guidance had been expected. Half of the participants reported pressure, stress, and a perceived lack of freedom, describing environments in which leaders micromanaged not only ministerial duties but personal choices and free time. Others described feeling profoundly misunderstood through top-down, dismissive communication, or powerless against the structural imbalance inherent in their dependent status. The most extreme accounts reached into the territory of psychological harm: inner conflict producing sleepless nights and paralysing indecision, fear so tangible that one participant locked doors for a sense of safety, apathy, and a crushing sense of inferiority. One participant’s sentence, which became the study’s title, compresses that experience into nine words: “I felt I wasn’t worthy of anything, not even of life.”

The community-level consequences were equally consequential. The most pronounced outcome was the deterioration of the relationship with the superior, led by a profound loss of trust reported by six of ten participants, in which initial openness was replaced by silence and caution. Members maintained physical or emotional distance, erected protective but cohesion-damaging boundaries, and resigned themselves emotionally to the relationship. The damage then spread horizontally. The most frequent community-level problem was polarisation, as the leader divided members into favoured and disfavoured camps, surrounding themselves with admirers who did not oppose them while dissenting voices were marginalised. This environment fostered mutual closedness, insincere communication, outright conflicts, and a pervasive atmosphere of fear that stifled open dialogue. Interestingly, the researchers note that the malicious envy and overt hostility toward exploitative leaders documented in workplace studies was conspicuously absent here; participants felt real anger, but the religious framing of the superior as a spiritual authority appears to have inhibited its escalation into hatred.

Perhaps the most paradoxical findings concern individual outcomes, which split cleanly down the middle. An equal number of participants reported personal growth and negative personal effects. On one side, the adversity spurred deeper self-reflection, maturity, and a more nuanced understanding of religious obedience. On the other, participants described distressing memories, emotional wounds, burnout, depression, and lasting difficulties forming trusting relationships. A recurring coping mechanism was a strengthening of faith, with members describing the conviction that God had allowed the situation but never abandoned them, a pattern the authors connect to the literature on positive religious coping among survivors of relationship abuse. The researchers caution, however, that an intensified reliance on faith-based coping carries its own risks, including religiously mediated guilt and a dynamic in which spiritual endurance quietly enables the persistence of toxic group dynamics.

The study’s methodological limitations are candidly acknowledged. The assessment of narcissism was entirely subjective, resting on participants’ interpretations of a term that is often overused in public discourse, and no clinical diagnosis was involved. The sample of ten is appropriate for qualitative depth rather than statistical generalisability, and the findings are embedded in Slovakia’s specific socioreligious landscape, where relatively high traditional religiosity may permit greater internal closedness and less external oversight of religious communities than in more secularised contexts. Social desirability may also have moderated some accounts, given participants’ strong identification with their communities despite rigorous anonymisation. The authors themselves stress that participants’ understandings of narcissism likely varied and were shaped by personal experience and colloquial usage rather than diagnostic criteria.

Even so, the study’s theoretical contribution is clear. It demonstrates that narcissistic leadership in religious settings is not a mystical exception to organisational psychology but a recognisable instance of it, operating through the same mechanisms of manipulation, empathy deficits, admiration-seeking, and feedback intolerance documented across decades of workplace research, while adding two context-specific twists: the sacralisation of the leader’s authority, which converts psychological pressure into spiritual obligation, and the vow of obedience, which converts a vulnerable employee’s ability to quit into a vow that must be honoured. It also illustrates the double-edged character of narcissism, long noted in leadership science, in a setting where the stakes are souls rather than quarterly results. A charismatic superior can revitalise communal life, reform rules, and open new service opportunities, while simultaneously fracturing trust, polarising the community, and grinding down individuals who have nowhere else to go.

The authors close by recommending that future research validate these findings across broader, more diverse ecumenical samples and investigate the personal and community factors that enable effective coping under such leadership. For the members of religious orders whose testimony anchors the study, the takeaway is both sobering and quietly hopeful: narcissistic leadership in religious communities is, on balance, mostly harmful, but it is neither invisible nor inescapable in its effects, and some people emerge from the experience not broken but matured, their faith deepened into a source of resilience that no superior could commandeer.