Mass wedding guru Sun Myung Moon hands power to sons

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the 89-year-old leader of the Unification Church is preparing to hand over the day to day running of the church to three of his 11 children

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This week Rev Moon, who is known for conducting mass weddings, will marry off tens of thousands of people from the United States to South Korea.

Brides in white carrying plastic bouquets and men in black suits and ties posed for photos after arriving at Sun Moon University in Asan, south of Seoul, for a ceremony that was to be broadcast live at similar events worldwide.

Rev Moon was set to marry off or renew wedding vows for 21,000 people in South Korea as well as for an estimated 20,000 people taking part in ceremonies from Sweden to Brazil and in nearly every US state, church officials said.

The “blessing ceremony” – the church’s largest in a decade – comes as Rev Moon is moving to hand day-to-day leadership over to three of his 11 children.

The three sons insist their father remains in charge and in good health.

However, they inherit an organisation that has gone beyond its pseudo-Christian origins to become a business empire spanning several countries, the Guardian reports. Its interests include a newspaper, the Washington Times, a gun manufacturer, hotels, an ad agency, a seafood distributor, a professional football team, and a ballet troupe.

While Rev Moon is expected to retain his overarching influence, the installation of his youngest son, Moon Hyung-jin, 30, as religious director is being seen as part of a drive to modernise the movement and secure new members and funds.

Rev 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 U.S. 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.

In recent years, the weddings have been smaller in scale.

“My wish is to completely tear down barriers and to create a world in which everyone becomes one,” he 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.

However, critics accuse the church of engaging in cultlike practices and say the mass weddings prove it brainwashes its followers.

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