GAPYEONG, South Korea, Feb 17: Thousands of Unification Church followers were married in a mass wedding in South Korea today – the first since the death of their “messiah” and controversial church founder Sun Myung Moon.
Some 3,500 identically-dressed couples – many of mixed nationality who had met just days before – took part in the ceremony at the church’s headquarters in Gapyeong, east of the capital Seoul.
Mass weddings, some held in giant sports stadia with tens of thousands of couples, have long been a signature feature of the church and one that “Moonie” critics have pointed to as evidence of cult underpinnings.
Today’s event carried a special resonance, with Moon’s 70-year-old widow Hak Ja Han presiding for the first time without her husband who died five months ago, aged 92, of complications from pneumonia.
The church’s mass weddings began in the early 1960s and originally involved just a few dozen couples. Over the years they grew in size and attracted international media attention.
In 1997, 30,000 couples tied the knot in Washington, and two years later around 21,000 filled the Olympic Stadium in Seoul.
Nearly all were personally matched by Moon and many were married just hours after meeting for the first time, and Moon’s preference for cross-cultural, international marriages means that they often shared no common language.
In recent years, matchmaking responsibilities have shifted towards parents, but 400 of the church members married today had chosen to be paired off a few days before at an “engagement ceremony” presided over by Moon’s widow.
“Yeah, I was pretty nervous,” admitted Jin Davidson, a 21-year-old student from the United States, whose Australian father and Japanese mother were matched by Moon.
“Then all of a sudden she popped up in front of me, and I said okay,” Davidson said of his Japanese bride-to-be, Kotona Shimizu, also 21.
“We struggle a little to communicate right now, as I speak no Japanese at all, and she only speaks a little English, but we see it as an exciting challenge and proof of our faith,” he said.
In a sign of the changing times, Lisa, from Trinidad and Tobago, first met her bridegroom, Hubert from Poland, on Skype after being put in contact by family and church friends.
Hubert visited her family in December and the couple decided to attend today’s event in South Korea.
Revered by his followers but denounced by critics as a charlatan who brainwashed church members, Moon was a deeply divisive figure whose shadowy business dealings saw him jailed in the United States. (AGENCIES)
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