Moon marries thousands in global wedding

Brides in white gowns and Japanese kimonos joined grooms in black suits and red ties today for the Unification Church’s biggest mass wedding in a decade – a spectacle said to involve 40,000 people around the world.

The “blessing ceremony” was the church’s largest since 1999, and may well be the last on such a grand scale officiated by 89-year-old Rev Sun Myung Moon, the controversial founder of the Unification Church.

Nearly a half-century after arranging the marriages of 24 couples in his first mass wedding, Moon offered blessings for more than 20,000 people gathered at Sun Moon University, the school he founded in Asan, south of Seoul, South Korea.

About half were marrying for the first time, some in marriages arranged by Moon himself; the rest were renewing their wedding vows. Twenty-thousand others were expected to watch via an internet broadcast at simultaneous ceremonies taking place from Sweden to Brazil.

The mass wedding came as Moon moves to hand day-to-day leadership over to his children. The Rev Moon Hyung-jin, the 30-year-old son tipped to take over religious leadership, opened today’s ceremony at the flower-festooned altar.

“The blessing you are receiving today is the most precious thing, one cannot exchange anything in the world,” he said.

He insists his father remains in charge of the church and in good health.

The massive global ceremony was meant to mark two key anniversaries in the leader’s life: his 90th birthday and his 50th wedding anniversary, church official said.

Row after row of brides wearing veils and grooms in white gloves – hailing from South Korea, the US, Japan and Europe – joined married couples renewing their vows. Earlier, they posed for photos, sang and practised shouting “Hurrah!” as the wedding rehearsal got under way.

“I’m a little bit nervous,” Rie Furuta, 25, admitted before the ceremony. She had her groom, Tadakuni Sano, both 25, from Japan, had met only three times since their marriage was arranged in March.

Critics who accuse the church of engaging in cult-like practices say the mass weddings prove it brainwashes its followers.

Followers routinely let Moon pick their spouses on the belief that he has divine insight and many meet their future spouses for the first time at the mass weddings.

Moon, a self-proclaimed Messiah who says he was 15 when Jesus Christ called upon him to carry out his unfinished work, has courted controversy and criticism since founding the Unification Church in Seoul in 1954.

He held his first mass wedding in the early 1960s, arranging the marriages of 24 couples himself and renewing the vows of 12 married couples.

Over the next two decades, the weddings grew in scale and began to involve followers from Japan, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the US and elsewhere. A 1982 mass wedding at Madison Square Garden in New York, the first held outside South Korea, drew tens of thousands of participants – and protesters. The ceremonies had been smaller in recent years.

“My wish is to completely tear down barriers and to create a world in which everyone becomes one,” Moon said in his recent autobiography.

He says the blessing ceremonies pairing followers from different backgrounds are part of his vision of building a multicultural religious world.