Splinters, Logs and Papal Fantasies

For reasons which are not entirely clear, some Catholics have chosen to make Mahatma Ghandi a surrogate for the new Pope, on the off-chance that said Pope is from the third world. The argument is both simple and simplistic: everyone likes the idea of Gandhi, but no one actually listens to what he said. Specifically, those darned liberals never actually listen to what Gandhi said about contraception. He was against it, you see, and those shameless Gandhi-promoters are for it, which demonstrates their shameless philosophical eclecticism.

Eclecticism is bad because it means you take just the pieces of a philosophy that you like and you leave behind the nasty bits that you don't like. Eclecticism, or "cafeteria philosophy" describes a large range of logical incoherence, including cafeteria Catholicism. And you know how logically solid the latter is.

Now, from what I can tell, we are supposed to get up in arms about this ignorance concerning Gandhi's anti-contraception attitudes. Why? Well, because his attack on contraception proves Gandhi was the Great Non-Christian Pro-Lifer, the man we Christians point to when we want to show off natural law. Gandhi, you see, is the Christian poster boy for how everyone who is open to natural law rejects contraception.

The message seems to be, "How dare those nasty MSM-types try to steal our poster boy!"

Yes.
Well.

Before we jump up and down, trying to extract the splinter from the eye of the MSM, let's take a look at the log in our own eye, shall we?

To put it bluntly, both liberals and Christians should avoid Mahatma Gandhi like the plague he is. Gandhi was a war-mongering ignoramus, and anyone who knows his story can tear apart the "Gandhi was right on contraception!" parade as easily as Joe Biden's wife takes out little fishies with her shotgun.

You see, Gandhi didn't just oppose contraception. He also opposed the use of penicillin. Yes, you read that correctly. When his own wife lay dying of an eminently treatable pneumonia, he refused to allow her to receive penicillin, despite the pleadings of his own son:

In August 1942, Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, among others, were imprisoned by the British in Aga Khan Palace, near Poona. Kasturba had poor circulation and she’d weathered several heart attacks. While detained in the palace, she developed bronchial pneumonia. One of her four sons, Devadas, wanted her to take penicillin. Gandhi refused. He was okay with her receiving traditional remedies, such as water from the Ganges, but he refused her any medicines, including this newfangled antibiotic, saying that the Almighty would have to heal her.

“The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi” quotes him on February 19, 1944; “If God wills it, He will pull her through.” “Gandhi: A Life” adds this wisdom from the Mahatma: “You cannot cure your mother now, no matter what wonder drugs you may muster. She is in God’s hands now.” Three days later, Devadas was still pushing for the penicillin, but Gandhi shot back: “Why don’t you trust God?” Kasturba died that day. 

The next night, Gandhi cried out: “But how God tested my faith!” He told one of Kasturba’s doctors that the antibiotic wouldn’t have saved her and that allowing her to have it “would have meant the bankruptcy of my faith.”

But Gandhi’s faith wasn’t much of an obstacle a short time later when it was his ass on the line. A mere six weeks after Kasturba died, Gandhi was flattened by malaria. He stuck to an all-liquid diet as his doctors tried to convince him to take quinine. But Gandhi completely refused and died of the disease, right? No, actually, after three weeks of deterioration, he took the diabolical drug and quickly recovered. The stuff about trusting God’s will and testing faith only applied when his wife’s life hung in the balance.

Elsewhere he wrote, "the will to live proved stronger than the devotion to truth." He was fine with the Nazis killing Jews in the ghettoes. He hated blacks, supported apartheid, went on a hunger strike to prevent the British from treating the Untouchables as human beings with equal human rights, and encouraged Hindus to kill Muslims after the British left India.

It has been reported that Gandhi “half-welcomed” the civil war that broke out in the last days. Even a fratricidal “bloodbath” (Gandhi’s word) would be preferable to the British.

And suddenly Gandhi began endorsing violence left, right, and center. During the fearsome rioting in Calcutta he gave his approval to men “using violence in a moral cause.” How could he tell them that violence was wrong, he asked, “unless I demonstrate that nonviolence is more effective?” He blessed the Nawab of Maler Kotla when he gave orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state...it is not widely realized (nor will this film tell you) how much violence was associated with Gandhi’s so-called “nonviolent” movement from the very beginning. 

He adored the British soldier, was a sergeant-major in the British army, led troops into combat, won a military combat medal from the British for his valor in the Boer wars, and petitioned the Queen of England to be allowed to raise regiments of all-volunteer Indian soldiers to fight alongside the British in WW I.

We won't discuss at length his predilection for both giving and receiving enemas, the delight he took in sleeping with young, naked Indian girls or his encouragement of young boys and girls to bathe and sleep together, but even in mentioning these things, I hope you begin to see the problems inherent for any Westerner who wants to use Gandhi for any kind of moral model.

Yet when it comes to the teaching on contraception, Christians, especially Catholics, love to trot this man out as some kind of non-Christian guru, deeply in touch with the natural law.

Now I've taken hundreds of words to explain something that could have been summarized very easily. Both liberals and conservatives, Christians and atheists, like to name-drop people who will support their points. We leave out the unhappy facts that swirl around and obscure the blessed narrative we try to construct.

The liberal MSM has their Gandhi fantasies, we Christians have our Gandhi fantasies, and both sides will use their own fantasies to "illuminate" the deep-seated fantasy we each carry about the future pope. But none of it - none of it - is real.

I am no fan of the liberal establishment media. But it isn't entirely fair to beat the press up for doing exactly what we do. So let us all simply allow Gandhi to molder in his grave and get on with the business of life without him, shall we?