On Feeling Like a Fraud and the Laughable Luck of Grace: The Wisdom of the Church for the Chronically Self-Doubting

I confess. Not the chest-banging, formulaic confession of the small child who hits his brother and then, eyes wide with mischief, mutters sorry, but the embarrassing adult kind: sometimes, despite the seminar diplomas and respectably creased trousers and the Most Holy Resume, one suspects with the tremulous certainty of a house salamander that one is truly, finally, a fraud. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to what the moderns call imposter syndrome, a disorder only in a world where everyone is supposed to be sure of themselves, all the time, and never let the mask slip¹.

There is, of course, nothing modern about it. Consider Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a prodigy with a penchant for mystical visions and medicinal plants, who spent years hiding her brilliance like a girl quietly stuffing cookies under the mattress because she feared she did not have the credentials, the nimble Latin, the proper hat. God Himself finally had to tug her by the ear, and still she hesitated, convinced that if anyone found out she was just—well, her—they’d close up shop and send her packing. Only later did she discover the great secret of all saints and perhaps of all of us: God is rarely interested in credentials, and is quite fond of leaky vessels².

Imposter syndrome is, in this Catholic soul’s opinion, seldom a sign of true spiritual failure. The Church in her wisdom does not pathologize what may in fact be a grace if rightly turned. At its root, is it not a wild cousin of humility, a cousin who doesn’t brush her hair and occasionally kicks the furniture but reminds you who you are and Who you are not? Dom Hubert van Zeller, that spiritual curmudgeon with the soft heart, wrote letters to young converts fretful that their new faith was a ruse, a rickety raft about to capsize. His medicine: perseverance, a sort of plodding forward in the face of self-doubt, because faith is not for the shiny, the quick-witted, or the never-wavering, but for those who, feeling like impostors, keep saying yes anyway, like Peter clambering out of the boat still not quite sure how to swim³.

But is the ache of not measuring up—this anxiety at being unmasked—just a neurotic flaw? Not according to the likes of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, that master cartographer of the interior life. Here, the night of sense, the “purifying trials of beginners,” is not a pathology but almost a rite of passage, stripping away trust in one’s own grandeur so that, in the darkness, God’s own silent music is faintly heard. Feelings of inadequacy, he says, may be the first whiff of real self-knowledge, that virtue the desert fathers blessed rather than abolished⁴.

Antonin Sertillanges, another wise and wrinkled theologian, reminds us that an intellectual life worthy of the name is not founded on dazzling performances or applause but on honest grappling with one’s own limitations. The pursuit of truth first requires a disposition willing to be little, to risk being foolish, to “lose oneself in it, not to think that one exists, nor that anything in the world exists but truth itself.” To step into this work shorn of pretension, to surrender the need to be more than a servant and student—this is sainthood disguised as insecurity⁵.

And what of the fear that we are not worthy to speak, to teach, to care for others in the name of God? Mother Catherine Doherty whispers that it is not the grandly competent or the supremely credentialed who change the world, but those who serve with “spiritual simplicity and self-forgetfulness,” daily choosing the little things with great love and letting the rest go. If you are convinced of your own smallness, congratulations—that is where the Lord’s own work begins⁶.

At the bedrock of Catholic teaching is a clear-eyed anthropology: we are dust and divine image, broken and beloved, made to fail and rise again, washed by grace into a dignity that neither résumé nor insecurity can ever earn. Matthias Scheeben, in his luminous theology, called this participation in divine life a supernatural “infusion” that sweeps up our ragged confidence into a glory not our own⁷. Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade counseled absolute surrender to God’s providence, trusting that being little—spiritually pint-sized—is the very soil in which peace can take root. “Let go of outcomes, and let God surprise us,” he urges⁸.

Is imposter syndrome always bad? Hardly. Sometimes it is simply honest. Elisabeth Leseur, wrestling with interior darkness and self-doubt, found that these struggles, when received with trust, became the crucible of sanctity—a “brutal spiritual battle” in which ego was crucified and Christ was born more deeply within⁹.

So what does the Church say about imposter syndrome, finally? Should we banish it, bandage it, or, with comic resignation, offer it a cup of tea and a seat at the table? In the final tally, it is not a wound to be erased, nor a temptation to be wrestled into oblivion, nor a flaw to be pasted over with motivational slogans. It is a reminder woven into the fabric of the saints: God delights in using the unlikely, the hesitant, the worried and the underqualified for the work of wonder. The Church asks us to let those feelings of inadequacy teach us humility, beckon us to honesty, and beckon us to trust that grace delightfully overcompensates for every lack¹⁰.

In the company of God’s peculiar friends, you are allowed to be awkward, unsure, a living contradiction. You are invited to laugh at your own trembling. You are welcome to kneel anyway, voice shaking. And when, just sometimes, you suspect you are unworthy of your vocation, your family, or the astonishing luck of grace—you might, in that very moment, actually be seeing things as God does: with love that is not dependent on confirming the rules, but on delighting in the impossible, the humbly honest, the redeemed rascals we truly are.

Footnotes

¹ “Imposter Syndrome, as defined in the Catholic Church, centers on a continuous fear, particularly within academic settings... the core of the syndrome is the dread of exposure as a fraud,” WisdomLib.org, 2025.
² “St. Hildegard & The Fight Against Imposter Syndrome,” FemCatholic, 2022.
³ “Pray, Hope, and Just Do It,” Catholic Exchange, 2022.
⁴ Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “The Three Ages Of The Interior Life - Volume 2,” e-Catholic 2000, 2024; John Schneider, “The Three Ages of the Interior Life,” Goodreads, 2013.
⁵ Antonin Sertillanges, O.P., “The Intellectual Life,” Prodigal Catholic, 2016; Stevie Reid, “The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods,” 2023.
⁶ Catherine de Hueck Doherty, “From Russia with love,” U.S. Catholic, 2022; “The Tranquility of God's Order,” Little With Great Love, 2025.
⁷ Matthias Scheeben, “The Root of Faith,” Woodstock Letters, 1948; First Things, 2012.
⁸ Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, 18th c.
⁹ “Elisabeth Leseur’s Transforming Witness of Crucified Love,” Catholic Exchange, 2024.
¹⁰ “Impostor Syndrome and the Body of Christ,” Little With Great Love, 2025.