There is the sin of ingratitude, and taking other people’s devotion or self-sacrifice for granted as our due. There is a sort of isolation which is reserved gone mad: you may be kindly enough disposed inside yourself, but your manner is such that people hesitate a long time before appealing to you for help, because you give the impression that you will not want to be disturbed or put out. This is akin to the voice of the “incuriosity” of which Saint Thomas treats: and which implies a sort of mental stagnation as far as social life is concerned, a lack of zest and interest which is also a lack of charity and responsibility, and denotes a lost childhood–the soul grown old and stale. You cannot be living in love and piety if nothing outside yourself has interest for you. On the other hand there is the vice of curiosity, which is the wrong sort of desire for information. It may be wrong because it is proud you want to know all about people and things because it feeds your sense of power it may be wrong because it is dissipated, distracting you from more important things or because it is a form of trespassing, that ruthless inquisitiveness to which nothing is sacred–people sometimes need to be reminded that to read letters not addressed to them may well be a grave sin; it may be wrong because it is directed to scandal-mongering and gossip; it will be wrong if in any way it is the expression not of a loving interest in others lives but of an anti-social inability to mind one’s own business. You must preserve or recapture the childlike quality of concern for the family but always distinguish it from the insatiable flutter-pated inquisitiveness which can never bear to be unacquainted with whatever is going on, however unimportant or however private.  –Father Gerald Vann ‘The Divine Pity’

Father Gerald Vann