I know how hard it is sometimes to spend all my available free time reading the Bible and praying due to my schoolwork, whilst others I know would eat out or go to a film.
As others have said, why are you doing that? Do you think that there is something sinful or un-Christian about going out for meals or going to the cinema? Unless you have a vocation to be a hermit, I’m not sure that spending all this time praying and reading the Bible is particularly good for you. Pope Benedict XVI played the piano and was fond of cats. Pope John Paul II enjoyed football, hiking, and skiing. Cardinal Basil Hume also liked football. A friend of mine at university who ran the student pro-life society also did student theatre - I once saw her in a production of
The Crucible. The Catholic chaplaincy organised sports teams, as did student societies representing other denominations and faiths (this would lead to amusing announcements at Mass along the lines of, “The men’s football team will be playing the Sikhs on Wednesday and the women’s netball team will be playing the Methodists on Friday”). The British Catholic publication
The Tablet has long carried a wine column authored by a Catholic priest, rumoured to be a diocesan bishop. I think you said in an earlier post that you feel that you only have one real friend at school, somebody who is conservative evangelical Protestant. Do you think that you would perhaps be a more effective witness for the faith if you were to spend more time socialising with people you own age, joining them for meals out, going to the cinema together, maybe following a sports team, in short, showing them that it’s possible to be a Catholic and also to be a normal person, rather than shunning these things and spending all your time studying and praying?
I think I really am anti-modern society.
I’m not sure that the Church requires people to be entirely opposed to modern society. Of course, there will be things in modern society that you will want to oppose, such as abortion, but I think the Church actually wants people to engage with society. There are a lot of features of modern society that are very interesting and positive. For example, Lech Wałęsa, who is a very conservative Catholic, has famously made a point of keeping up to date with all the latest technology and builds computers as a hobby.
Overall, this post, and others here, risk coming across as promoting a kind of Catholicism that is defined by its opposition to things that you disapprove of and by separating yourself from the mainstream as much as possible. I honestly think that you will be a lot happier and that you will have a more fruitful faith if you try to engage a bit more with the world and perhaps focus on some of the great things that the Catholic faith promotes, such as social justice, opposing the death penalty, or doing voluntary work.
), I will always stick to my faith.