By HYUNG-JIN KIM
Associated Press
GAPYEONG, South Korea (AP) -
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 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 on 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 3 million followers, including 100,000 members in the U.S.,
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
included the Washington Times newspaper; Connecticut's Bridgeport
University; the New Yorker Hotel, a midtown Manhattan art deco landmark,
and a seafood distribution firm that supplies sushi to Japanese
restaurants across the U.S. 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.
Born in 1920 in a rural
part of what is today North Korea, Moon 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. They have 10 surviving sons and
daughters, according to the church.
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 U.S. federal prison in the mid-1980s after a New York City
jury convicted him of filing false tax returns. The church says the U.S.
government persecuted Moon because of his growing influence and
popularity with young Americans.
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. His
U.S.-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.
In 2009, Moon 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. He 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.
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."
___
AP writer Sam Kim contributed to this story from Seoul.
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