'The Pope', continued Tisserant, was very interested and remarked I had probably done the right thing in not going to the play.' Tisserant summed up the occasion as 'a very valuable time'.5

For Buchman this news was particularly welcome. It seemed like a light at the end of a dark tunnel. For ten years he had found it difficult to understand why his work was judged harshly by some authorities in the Roman Church. Non-Catholics in Moral Re-Armament had begun to understand the Church better and to realise that in naively insisting on their own ideas and methods they had at times been offensive. This had stopped but it had seemed to make little difference. It was not, in fact, till some years after Buchman's death that it became clear that Tisserant's report was the beginning of a new situation. The ecumenical spirit of the Vatican Council had still to do its work, and personal contacts with Cardinal Ottaviani, the head of the Holy Office at the time of its warning, were nearly ten years ahead. Gabriel Marcel reported that Ottaviani then said, 'There was once a misunderstanding, but that is all over.'6

Two weeks after receiving news of Tisserant's action in Rome, Buchman was asked by Konrad Adenauer to meet him in Los Angeles where he was being given an honorary degree by the University of California. The previous December Buchman had had a mock exchange of letters with the Chancellor's eighteenth grandchild, Sven-Georg, the first son of Georg Adenauer. Buchman had written to the three-month-old baby how much he disagreed with Krushchev's statement that the grandchildren of today's statesmen would be Communists. A long letter of news from all around the world followed to support his contention that those children would be Christian revolutionaries who would be changing the Communists. He was amused by the reply which arrived by return: 'Dear kind Uncle Frank, Thank you very much, also on behalf of my parents and my grandfather, for your kind and touching letter which I got today. It is the first letter of my young life and because of its importance, I shall want to keep it safe. 'I am very well, only sometimes at night when I get hungry I have to cry for an hour or so.

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Photo: Konrad Adenauer came to Caux, September 1948. Here he visits Buchman in Los Angeles, 1960, when Chancellor.
©Richard Tegstr?m/MRA Productions