When a priest disappoints: attachment, disillusionment, and the anchor beneath

A priest is present at the moments that define a Catholic life: baptism, confession, the deathbed, the altar. When he fails publicly, through moral collapse or betrayal of trust, the damage reaches past disappointment in a professional and into the structure of how a person has been relating to God. A commentary by Patti Maguire Armstrong, published in the National Catholic Register on July 8, 2026, addresses this directly.[^1] Her core argument: faith does not have to fracture when a minister does, because the sacraments carry what no individual priest owns. That argument is theologically sound. What it leaves open, and what psychology can supply, is an account of why the fracture happens in the first place, and what the repair actually involves.

The theological ground

Armstrong's piece draws on a well-known episode from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Townspeople brought Francis before a priest living in open scandal, expecting a public rebuke. Francis knelt instead and kissed the priest's hands, the same hands that still consecrated the Eucharist, whatever the man's private failures. The gesture located the priesthood's meaning in what it carries beyond the man himself, whatever he had done.

The doctrinal foundation behind that gesture is ex opere operato: the sacraments work by virtue of the act itself, not by the holiness of the minister. Augustine of Hippo developed the principle precisely because the early Church already knew ministers would fail. Tying sacramental grace to the moral condition of the priest would rest the entire structure of Catholic life on perpetually shifting ground.

Armstrong also quotes a description of the priesthood that Cardinal Timothy Dolan has used in his own writing and addresses: "a call, not a career; a redefinition of self, not just a new ministry; a way of life, not a job; a state of being, not just a function; a permanent, lifelong commitment, not a temporary style of service; an identity, not just a role."[^1] The description explains both why clerical failure lands so hard (the man who collapsed was supposed to have given himself entirely) and what the tradition asks the believer to look past: not the man's gifts, but what he was ordained to be a conduit of.

Where attachment theory enters

Armstrong's conclusion, keep your eyes on Christ, not on the priest, is right. But it tends to treat the misplacement of trust as an error to be corrected rather than a wound to be understood. Attachment theory supplies the missing account.

The framework goes back to John Bowlby's original research on early bonding: a child's first relationships build an internal working model, an implicit map of who can be trusted and where safety lies, and that model gets carried forward into every later relationship that matters, including, for many believers, their relationship to religious authority.[^2] When a priest becomes the primary human mediator of someone's relationship with God (confessor, spiritual director, beloved pastor), that person has formed a genuine attachment bond. The priest becomes, in psychological terms, a safe base: the figure through whom security and transcendence are accessed. When that figure collapses, the internal working model itself is disrupted. The person loses, at least temporarily, their felt sense of how to locate God.

This is the mechanism Armstrong's theological account doesn't fully name. Disillusionment is what happens when someone has been, in effect, attached to a faulty model, bonded to the mediator in a way that was never meant to be the design, rather than simply discovering that a priest was not what he seemed. Catholic faith has always held that the proper object of that bond is Christ, and that the priest functions as a transparent sign pointing toward him. The tragedy of deep disillusionment is that the sign became opaque, then the sign collapsed, and the person has not yet found how to see past it.

What repair looks like

The therapeutic and pastoral implications differ depending on which problem is actually presenting. If the issue is theological confusion (a person who genuinely does not understand that sacramental grace does not depend on the minister's holiness), then instruction helps. But that is rarely the presenting problem in clinical or pastoral work. The person sitting with a counselor after a scandal usually knows the doctrine. The wound is not informational.

The more common work is helping someone grieve the attachment figure who failed them, while gradually distinguishing the mediator from what was being mediated. Groeschel, writing on the spiritual condition of clergy and the pastoral complexity of clerical failure, observed that serious engagement with these situations requires honesty about the gap between what a priest is ordained to be and what a specific man has done.[^3] Collapsing that gap, either by excusing the failure or by letting the failure define the entire ministry, serves no one.

The liturgy itself, over time, trains the reorientation the psychology calls for: a habituated direction of attention away from the minister and toward what he elevates. When a minister becomes the center of a scandal, that habituation, built up across years of formation, is a genuine psychological resource: a way of knowing where to look once the wound has been acknowledged, already trained into the body before the crisis ever arrives.

Von Balthasar observed that genuine calls from God sometimes pass through conditions of impossible conflict, circumstances in which the grace being offered and the human failure surrounding it cannot be neatly separated.[^4] The person navigating clerical disillusionment often lives that tension: something real was given through this man, and this man also did real harm. Both can be true. The pastoral task is not resolving the tension prematurely but accompanying someone through it long enough that they can distinguish the gift from the giver.

The anchor beneath the figure

Armstrong is right that faith need not be lost when a priest fails. The psychological account makes the same point in different terms: the original attachment was never meant to terminate in the priest. It was meant to pass through him toward the God who does not fail. When a person experiences directly, in felt reality and not only as an idea assented to, that the ground beneath the mediator held even as the mediator fell, something happens that exceeds the recovery of a theological position: the repair of an attachment structure, a reorientation of the internal working model toward its proper object.

The failures of individual priests are real, and accompaniment must name them as such. The resources for moving through those failures, sacramental, psychological, and pastoral, are also real. The work is helping people experience the distinction between the two.

References

[^1]: Patti Maguire Armstrong, "Don't Let a Priest's Failure Cost You Your Faith," National Catholic Register, July 8, 2026.

[^2]: John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969), on internal working models and the function of the attachment figure as a secure base.

[^3]: Benedict J. Groeschel, The Reform of Renewal (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), chapter on the spiritual condition of the clergy.

[^4]: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), p. 327.