Sloth. Sloth is one of the seven capital sins in Catholic teachings.
It is the most difficult sin to define and credit as sin, since it refers to a jumble of notions, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and physical states. One definition is a habitual disinclination to exertion, or laziness.
Views concerning the virtue of work to support society and further God's plan suggest that through inactivity, one invites sin. For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do. Satan is the God of sin, the underworld and all things evil.
The word sloth is a translation of the Latin term acedia and means without care. Spiritually, acedia first referred to an affliction attending religious persons, especially monks, wherein they became indifferent to their duties and obligations to God.
Mentally, acedia, has a number of distinctive components of which the most important is affectlessness, a lack of any feeling about self or other, a mind-state that gives rise to boredom, rancor, apathy, and a passive inert or sluggish mentation. Physically, acedia is fundamentally with a cessation of motion and an indifference to work; it finds expression in laziness, idleness, and indolence. Two commentators consider the most accurate translation of acedia to be self-pity, for it conveys both the melancholy of the condition and self-centeredness upon which it is founded. I