As with the ICFTU report, however, Buchman's main interest was with those who spoke up for his work in the Church Assembly. They included the Archdeacon of Halifax, who asked that the Assembly pass on to other business; Sir Cyril Atkinson who wished the Assembly to declare that the report was 'harmful and unjust to a great religious movement'; Lord Selborne who said he read it 'with profound regret and not a little resentment', and the Dean of Exeter who made a last-minute attempt to have the report withdrawn. Buchman was particularly interested in the intervention of the Dean of Westminster, Dr A. C. Don, who, as Archbishop Lang's Chaplain, had conducted the earlier and far more thorough investigation into Buchman and his work. In the debate he stated that 'the report gave him an impression of a lack of open- mindedness in one or two cases. He felt that no good would accrue to the MRA or the Church of England by continuing the debate ...' The Assembly, he went on, 'should guard against saying things that might be untrue and uncharitable, and thereby alienate from the Church of England many good and high-principled people who - whether the Assembly liked it or not - had found in MRA something that they had failed to find elsewhere.'39

Neither the report nor the debate did any good to either party. The Church's supposed condemnation was used by the enemies of Moral Re-Armament, and naturally made many Christians cautious or even contemptuous in their attitude. Those associated with Moral Re-Armament who were members of the Church of England continued to go to their churches, where alone they could receive the sacraments, but it did reinforce in many an impatience at the 'ineffectiveness' of the Church, as admitted in the report, and in some an unwarranted sense of superiority.

Apart from these disparate public attacks on his work Buchman had a more long-term and constant concern: the attitude of Rome. Hundreds of Catholics were coming to Caux each year, and he encountered many in the London docks and in the factories of France, Italy and America. He himself held to the attitude he had expressed to a leading English Jesuit as early as 1933, when he wrote, 'Our principle has always been to send all Roman Catholics back to their Fathers for confession...'40 As for those non-believers who had come to an experience of God through his work, he had added in the same letter, 'Our whole policy is to let each individual decide to what church he is guided to go. Many have become convinced Roman Catholics.' He felt that any renewal of faith which God used him to bring to anyone should enhance, not weaken, their primary loyalties.

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