Rev Moon drinks a toast with his family during his 91st birthday party. (Photo: Reuters)
GAPYEONG, South Korea—The Rev Sun Myung Moon was a self-proclaimed
messiah who built a global business empire. He called both North Korean
leaders and American presidents his friends, but spent time in prisons
in both countries. His followers around the world cherished him, while
his detractors accused him of brainwashing recruits and extracting money
from worshippers.
These contradictions did nothing to stop the founder of the
Unification Church from turning his religious vision into a worldwide
movement and a multibillion-dollar corporation stretching from the
Korean Peninsula to the United States.
Moon died Monday at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong
County, northeast of Seoul, two weeks after being hospitalized with
pneumonia, Unification Church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul told The Associated
Press. Moon’s wife and children were at his side, Ahn said. He was 92.
The church will hold a 13-day mourning period beginning Monday and
start accepting mourners Thursday at a multipurpose gym at its nearby
religious center, the church said in a statement. The funeral will be
held Sept. 15, and Moon will be buried at nearby Cheonseung Mountain,
where his home is located, the statement said.
Moon founded his Bible-based religion in Seoul in 1954, a year after
the Korean War ended, saying Jesus Christ personally called on him to
complete his work.
The church gained fame—and notoriety—by marrying thousands of
followers in mass ceremonies presided over by Moon himself. The couples
often came from different countries and had never met, but were matched
up by Moon in a bid to build a multicultural religious world.
Today, the Unification Church has three million followers, including
100,000 members in the US, and has sent missionaries to 194 countries,
Ahn said. But ex-members and critics say the figure is actually no more
than 100,000 members worldwide.
The church’s holdings include the Washington Times newspaper; the New
Yorker Hotel, a midtown Manhattan art deco landmark; and a seafood
distribution firm that supplies sushi to Japanese restaurants across the
US. It gave the University of Bridgeport US $110 million over more than
a decade to keep the Connecticut school operating.
It acquired a ski resort, a professional football team and other
businesses in South Korea. It also operates a foreign-owned luxury hotel
in North Korea and jointly operates a fledgling North Korean automaker.
The church has been accused of using devious recruitment tactics and
duping followers out of money. Parents of followers in the United States
and elsewhere have expressed worries that their children were
brainwashed into joining. The church has pointed out that many new
religious movements faced similar accusations in their early years.
Moon’s followers were often called “Moonies,” a term many found
pejorative.
Moon was born in 1920 in a rural part of what is today North Korea.
He said he was 16 when Jesus Christ first appeared to him and told him
to finish the work he had begun on Earth 2,000 years earlier. Moon, who
tried to preach the gospel in the North, was imprisoned there in the
late 1940s for alleged spying for South Korea; he disputed the charge.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, he went to South Korea. After
divorcing his first wife, he married Hak Ja Han Moon in 1960.
In South Korea, Moon quickly drew young acolytes to his conservative,
family-oriented value system and unusual interpretation of the Bible.
He conducted his first mass wedding in Seoul in the early 1960s, and the
“blessing ceremonies” grew in scale over the years. A 1982 wedding at
New York’s Madison Square Garden—the first outside South Korea—drew
thousands of participants.
“International and intercultural marriages are the quickest way to
bring about an ideal world of peace,” Moon said in a 2009 autobiography.
“People should marry across national and cultural boundaries with
people from countries they consider to be their enemies so that the
world of peace can come that much more quickly.”
Moon began building a relationship with North Korea in 1991, even
meeting with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, in the eastern North
Korean port city of Hamhung. In his autobiography, Moon said he urged
Kim to give up his nuclear ambitions, and that Kim responded by saying
that his atomic program was for peaceful purposes and he had no
intention to use it to “kill my own people.”
“The two of us were able to communicate well about our shared hobbies
of hunting and fishing,” Moon wrote. “At one point, we each felt we had
so much to say to the other that we just started talking like old
friends meeting after a long separation.”
When Kim died in 1994, Moon sent a condolence delegation to North
Korea, drawing criticism from conservatives at home. The late Kim Jong
Il, who succeeded his father as North Korean leader, sent roses, prized
wild ginseng, Rolex watches and other gifts to Moon on his birthday each
year. Moon said Kim Il Sung had instructed Kim Jong Il that “after I
die, if there are things to discuss pertaining to North-South relations,
you must always seek the advice of President Moon.”
The church also sent a delegation to pay its respects after Kim Jong
Il died in December and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Un.
Moon sought and eventually developed a good relationship with
conservative American leaders such as former Presidents Richard Nixon,
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Yet he also served 13 months at a US federal prison in the mid-1980s
after a New York City jury convicted him of filing false tax returns.
The church says the US government persecuted Moon because of his growing
influence and popularity with young Americans.
One of the more bizarre chapters in Moon’s relationship with
Washington came in 2004, when more than a dozen US lawmakers attended a
“coronation ceremony” for Moon and his wife in which Moon declared
himself humanity’s savior and said his teachings have helped Hitler and
Stalin be “reborn as new persons.” Some of the congressmen later said
they had been misled and had not been aware that Moon would be at the
event.
In later years, the church adopted a lower profile in the United
States and focused on building up its businesses. Moon lived for more
than 30 years in the United States, the church said.
As he grew older, Moon also handed over day-to-day control of his
empire to his children, but in 2009 he married 45,000 people in
simultaneous ceremonies worldwide in his first large-scale mass wedding
in years, the church said. Some were newlyweds and others reaffirmed
past vows.
Moon married an additional 7,000 couples in South Korea in February
2010. The ceremonies attracted media coverage but little of the
controversy that dogged the church in earlier decades.
Moon and Hak Ja Han have 10 surviving sons and daughters, according to the church.
One of Moon’s sons reportedly sued his mother in 2011 demanding the
return of more than US $22 million allegedly sent without his consent
from a company he runs to his mother’s missionary group. Yonhap news
agency reported that a court ruled the money was a loan but ordered it
returned.
Another son committed suicide in 1999, officials said, plunging to
his death from the 17th floor of Harrah’s hotel in downtown Reno,
Nevada. Two other sons reportedly died in accidents, one in a car
accident and another in a train wreck.
Moon’s US-born youngest son, the Rev Hyung-jin Moon, was named the
church’s top religious director in April 2008. Other children run the
church’s businesses and charitable activities in South Korea and abroad.
Hyung-jin Moon told The Associated Press in February 2010 that his father’s offspring do not see themselves as his successors.
“Our role is not inheriting that messianic role,” he said. “Our role
is more of the apostles … where we become the bridge between
understanding what kind of lives (our) two parents have lived.”
![Thant, U [Credit: United Nations photograph]](http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/54/4654-003-5CA8E798.jpg)
was the Myanmar nationalist leader and assassinated hero who was
instrumental in securing Myanmar's independence from Great Britain.
Before World War II Aung San was actively anti-British; he then
allied with the Japanese during World War II, but switched to the Allies
before leading the Myanmar drive for autonomy.
