ONE of the most controversial religious figures of the last half century, Sun Myung Moon of the infamous Unification Church, is dead.
Moon, whose congregants were derisively tagged as Moonies and branded as cult members, died early Monday in South Korea, following a case of pneumonia.
He was 92 years old.
Doctors put Moon in intensive care in a Seoul hospital last week Tuesday after he suddenly fell ill, church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeol had said then. At the time, physicians gave him a 50% chance of survival.
The Unification Church gained fame worldwide for its mass weddings decades ago, including at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.
Many met their spouses-to-be for the first time during the ceremony. In addition to weddings in South Korea, couples from various countries took part in the ceremony through satellite hookups.
The controversial Moon, whose church critics compare to a cult, served a federal prison term in the United States for tax evasion.
His church believes that Jesus was divine but he is not God, a position that puts the Unification Church outside the bounds of traditional Christianity.
Followers instead regard Moon as the messiah who is completing the salvation mission that Jesus Christ failed to accomplish.
Moon also had considerable following in Nigeria, where many were taken by his claim to be the messiah. In an environment where everyone from Sat Guru Maharaji and the so-called Jesus of Oyingbo found thousands of following, Moon found even larger following. Many bought into his idea of mass wedding, often taking advantage of the opportunity to escape their poverty in the country for better climes.
Although greeted as a Korean Billy Graham when he arrived in the United States four decades ago, Moon emerged over time as a religious figure with quite different beliefs.
At the height of his popularity, he claimed 5 million members worldwide, a figure that ex-members and other observers have called inflated. Those numbers are believed to have fallen into the thousands today.
Another unusual trait about Moon was his multinational corporate vision that made him a millionaire many times over. He owned vast tracts of land in the U.S. and South America, as well as dozens of enterprises, including a ballet company, a university, a gun manufacturer, a seafood operation and several media organizations, most notably the conservative Washington Times newspaper. He also owns United Press International.
Moon delivered sermons through interpreters, often rambling on for hours and exhorting followers against using “love organs” in promiscuous behavior or homosexual relationships.
His ideas often seemed bizarre: He believed in numerology, proposed building a highway around the world and for a while embraced a Zimbabwean man as the reincarnation of a son who had died in an accident.
He courted the powerful with surprising success, at one time counting among his friends and allies Christian right leader Jerry Falwell, who defended Moon when he was tried and later convicted in the U.S. on charges of tax evasion; the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan, who shared pulpits with him; and former President George H.W. Bush, who appeared at Unification Church-affiliated events in the U.S. and abroad.
In 2004, Moon invited guests to a U.S. Senate office building in Washington, where he had himself crowned “none other than humanity’s Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent.” The ceremony was attended by a dozen members of Congress, several of whom later told reporters they had been misled about the purpose of the event.
- Additional reporting from the LA Times.