BUCHMANISM. - So called by some writers from the name of its founder, Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman. Buchmanism is known under various names; at first it was called simply the "Group Movement"; shortly afterward it took the name "Oxford Group Movement," from the fact that it first spread especially among the students of Oxford, and now "Moral Re-Armament," whence the abbreviation M.R.A. They claim to be the Christians of the first century (First Century Christians) and say they wish to help all the other Churches. They proclaim the same principle that G. Wesley held with regard to the official Church of England, and Swedenborg with regard to the Protestant sects; and yet the one gave rise to Methodism and the second to the Church of the New Jerusalem.
The initiator of this "movement" was born in 1878 at Pannburg in Pennsylvania; he was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1902 and for some time administered a small Lutheran parish. Having become disgusted, it seems, with the administrators of the Overbrook hospice, in 1908 he made a journey to England. Whether, as Ivor Thomas says, he was converted at the Keswick Convention, or, as others recount, he felt himself moved in a little country church, he wrote letters asking forgiveness of the administrators of Overbrook. The peace that he felt in his soul after this act made him reflect and then formulate an entire theory of his own concerning the spiritual usefulness of knowing one's own sins, of confessing them to someone, of abandoning oneself to God, of listening to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. Having returned to his homeland, he immediately began to apply this method of his to some university students, and after some years he made a journey to the East. In 1921 he visited the University of Cambridge, where he attracted some followers, with whom he settled at Oxford. It did not take him long to gather around himself a fine group of students, and, exploiting their youthful enthusiasm, he urged them to propagate his methods and his doctrines. Among others, the journeys they made to South Africa (1928-29), to Canada and the United States (1932), and the great meeting at Hollywood (Cal.), in 1939, have remained famous. At this one especially there was an imposing display of advertising art and propaganda literature, with sensational headlines, e.g., "a mystic crusade for moral rearmament," etc. On the stage crowned with an arch, and beneath the announcement "New men, new nations, a new world," the abbreviation M.R.A. stood out amid a forest of flags raised by the representatives of 30 nations. They claimed that by moral rearmament they would arrive at world peace, and a few months later the most monstrous 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 in South Africa; they have had some success in other Protestant countries; little or nothing in Catholic countries.
Buchman has written no book on his method, but he has communicated to his followers his religious experience of a revival of what, according to him, constitutes primitive Christianity (First Century Christianism): to gather in groups under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, to confess one's sins to one another (Io. 5, 16; Eph. 4, 25), to consecrate oneself entirely to Christ and to induce others to be converted to the same life. According to this interpretation, Buchman established, as the essential constituents of the movement, four standards of life (Standards of Life): absolute honesty (in business), absolute purity (in morals), absolute unselfishness, absolute love; and four practices: Sharing, communicating to others one's own religious experiences, confessing one's sins, temptations, etc.; Surrender: abandoning one's life totally to God's guidance; Restitution: repairing the 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 practicing the Quiet time, a time, even if brief, of spiritual recollection in order to be able to listen to such guidance. Proselytism is essential, so that every group member must necessarily be a Life-changer, an ardent converter, in order to change the world as soon as possible. The feverish anxiety for conversions with pathetic appeals and with radiant millenarian visions of a world in peace and prosperity is an unfailing characteristic of the Buchmanist style. Propaganda is carried out, besides individually, in gatherings of invited guests in a house or in some country villa, called House-parties, and more widely in missionary expeditions of propagandists, called Teams, also with public gatherings, speeches and spectacular parades, such as the nighttime one of 30,000 people at Hollywood on 19 July 1939. Groupism professes no dogma and no particular confession; indeed it wants group members to remain in their respective confessions to revive Christian conscience there; for this reason in 1939 in America it took a new, more generic name: "Moral Re-Armament."
Nevertheless it has raised opposition also in the Protestant camp. In reality it is a Protestant sect, like Methodism, to which it is very similar. In the Catholic camp there is no lack of those who regard it with a certain approval; others believe that it falls under the prohibition of CIC, 1258, § 1, even while regarding the movement with benevolent sympathy, insofar as it strives to revive the religious and moral life languishing in Protestantism. The principal reasons are the following: because it prescinds totally from the ecclesiastical hierarchy; because of the grave danger of Sharing, both public and private, done to just anyone, and also between young people of different sexes; because of the danger of taking in the Quiet Time as inspirations of the Holy Spirit what is a product of the imagination, or of personal inclinations; because of the superficiality of the "changes of life" or "conversions" made at family receptions, etc. Very grave drawbacks that cannot be compensated for by some success obtained by the group leaders, by the good will that they manifest also toward the Catholic Church, nor by the zeal that animates them.