One tagline which Mark Shea used (or once used) with some frequency is "Sin makes you stupid." There are, on the whole, two forms that stupidity takes: one is merely a defect in the intellect, the other is a defect in the will. Sometimes the two look similar, but at the end of the day a man may make himself stupid by obstinately refusing to learn truth: the honestly (that is, intellectually) stupid person may still recognize truth when it hits him in the face.
The studied stupidity in turn takes a number of forms: obstinance, deliberate confusion, about simply concepts, embracing a known lie or falsehood or sin. It is for this reason that perhaps that the Church distinguishes between vincible and invincible ignorance: the intellectually stupid person is is often innocently ignorant; the willfully stupid person usually cannot make this claim.
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