BUCHMANISMO. - Thus called by some writers after the name of its founder, Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman. B. is known under various names; at first it was simply called the “Group Movement” (Group Movement); shortly afterwards it took the name of the “Oxford Group Movement” (Oxford Group Movement), because it first spread especially among the students of Oxford, and now that of “Moral Re-Armament” (Moral Re-Armament), whence the initials M.R.A. Its adherents claim to be First Century Christians (First Century Christians) and say that they wish to help all the other Churches. They proclaim the same principle held by G. Wesley with regard to the official Church of England, and by Swedenborg with regard to the Protestant sects; yet the former gave rise to Methodism and the latter to the Church of the New Jerusalem.
The initiator of this “movement” was born in 1878 at Pannburg, Pennsylvania; he was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1902 and for some time served a small Lutheran parish. Having become disgusted, it seems, with the administrators of the Overbrook hospice, he travelled to England in 1908. Whether, as Ivor Thomas says, he was converted at the Keswick Convention (Convention), or whether, as others relate, he felt himself moved in a little country church, he asked forgiveness of the administrators of Overbrook by letter. The peace which he felt in his soul after this act led him to reflect and then to formulate an entire theory concerning the spiritual usefulness of knowing one’s sins, confessing them to someone, abandoning oneself to God, and listening to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. On returning to his country, he immediately began to apply this method to some university students, and after some years he travelled to the East. In 1921 he visited the University of Cambridge, where he attracted some followers, with whom he settled in Oxford. It was not long before he gathered around himself a considerable
group of students and, taking advantage of their youthful enthusiasm, urged them to propagate his methods and doctrines. Among others, the journeys they made to South Africa (1928–29), Canada and the United States (1932), and the great gathering at Hollywood, California, in 1939, have remained famous. The latter especially displayed an impressive array of advertising art and propaganda literature, with sensational titles, for example, “a mystical crusade for moral rearmament,” etc. On the arch-crowned stage, and upon the announcement, “New men, new nations, a new world,” the initials M.R.A. stood out amid a forest of flags raised by the representatives of thirty nations. By moral rearmament they claimed to attain world peace, and a few months later the most terrible of all wars broke out. The groups, under the new name of M.R.A., have spread especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in Canada and South Africa; they have had some success in other Protestant countries, but little or none in Catholic countries.
Buchman wrote no book on his method, but communicated to his followers his religious experience of a revival of what, according to him, constitutes primitive Christianity (First Century Christianism): gathering in groups under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, mutually confessing one’s sins (Io. 5, 16; Eph. 4, 25), consecrating oneself entirely to Christ, and inducing others to be converted to the same life. According to this interpretation, Buchman established as essential constitutive elements of the movement four standards of life (Standards of Life): absolute honesty (in business), absolute purity (in morals), absolute unselfishness, and absolute love; and four practices: Sharing, communicating one’s religious experiences to others by confessing one’s sins, temptations, etc.; Surrender: totally abandoning one’s life to God’s guidance; Restitution: making reparation for evil done; Listening to God's Guidance, listening to and following the guidance of the Holy Spirit in everything to be done or said, and therefore practising Quiet time, a period, however brief, of spiritual recollection in order to be able to listen to such guidance. Proselytism is essential; thus every group member must necessarily be a Life-changer, an ardent converter, in order to change the world as soon as possible. An anxious fever for conversions, with pathetic appeals and radiant millenarian visions of a world at peace and in prosperity, is an unfailing characteristic of the Buchmanite style. Propaganda is carried on, besides individually, in gatherings of invited persons in a house or some country villa, called House-parties, and more extensively through missionary expeditions of propagandists, called Teams, also by means of public meetings, speeches, and spectacular parades, such as the nocturnal procession of 30,000 persons at Hollywood on 19 July 1939. Groupism professes no dogma and no particular confession; indeed, it wishes group members to remain in their respective confessions in order to revive Christian consciousness there. For this reason it adopted in America, in 1939, a new and more general name: “Moral Re-Armament” (Moral Re-Armament).
Nevertheless, it has aroused opposition even in the Protestant field. In reality it is a Protestant sect, like Methodism, to which it bears a close resemblance. In the Catholic field there are some who regard it with a certain approval; others believe that it falls under the prohibition of CIC, 1258, § 1, while viewing with benevolent sympathy the movement insofar as it strives to revive the languishing religious and moral life of Protestantism. The principal reasons are the following: because it entirely disregards ecclesiastical hierarchy; because of the grave danger of Sharing, whether public or private, practised with any person whatsoever, even among young people of different sexes; because of the danger of taking as inspirations of the Holy Spirit, during Quiet Time, what is the product of imagination or personal inclinations; because of the superficiality
of the “changes of life” or “conversions” effected at family receptions, etc. These are very grave disadvantages, which cannot be offset by such success as the group leaders may have obtained, by the goodwill they show even towards the Catholic Church, or by the zeal which animates them.