The danger of servitude, especially to the electronic media, is not only that it wastes time and incapacitates, but it also serves as a channel through which evil thoughts about which St. Benedict speaks (cogitationes malas, RB: 4:50), enter the mind of the monk or nun (or lay person) and thence pass through to the community (or family). I am not speaking merely about lubricious thoughts — the “scurrilities” to which Benedict was so uncompromisingly opposed — I am thinking of the erosion of fundamental values and the coarsening of the mind itself that result from daily preoccupation with triviality. When the beliefs and values weaken, only external constraint holds us to monastic praxis, and the joie de vivre eneluctably declines.
Michael Casey
Strangers in the City, p. 43
