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Summary South Korea's Unification Church held a mass wedding with couples from 54 countries.
The Unification Church held a mass wedding and holy blessing in South Korea on Saturday, with 2,000 couples from 54 countries participating. More than 20,000 church followers gathered at a stadium in Gapyeong, 75km (47 miles) northeast of Seoul.The founder of the church, Sun Myung Moon, and his wife were there to bless the mass ceremony. They sprinkled holy water over selected couples and declared them married.The mass wedding leads all mankind to be one, removing the boundaries of ethnicities, religions and nationalities. Our goal is making the world peaceful with forming new families, said Seuk Joon-ho, President of Unification Church of Korea.Couples from South Korea and abroad hugged each other and celebrated after exchanging wedding rings.I am happy and I feel I should live harder in the future after having a special joint blessing ceremony altogether, not a normal wedding, said South Korean bride Lee Hang-joo.This whole experience has been absolutely amazing. I mean really really happy to have met Lisun (his bride) and really happy that we are together now and really look forward to years ahead and so getting to know her well, said a bridegroom Chouchane Saemie, from the United Kingdom.Counting those who joined via Internet, a total of 5,200 couples worldwide in over 100 different nations received blessings on the same day.The couples consisted of 1,200 newly-wed couples and 4,000 already married couples -- seeking to re-dedicate their marriages and families to God as they had married before they were converted to the church.The church has been derided for its mass weddings as thousands of participants were matched with future spouses whom some of them had just met before the ceremony, and in many cases, did not speak the same language.The Unification Church considers the Korean peninsula a sacred place with its website saying that Jesus Christ appeared to founder and overall leader Moon Sun-myung as he was praying in the Korean mountains and asked him to complete the task of establishing Gods kingdom on Earth.The founder has been a lightning rod for controversy and was once jailed in the United States for tax evasion. He also declared in 1992 that he and his wife were messiahs.Critics have for years vilified the organization as a heretical and dangerous cult while questioning its murky finances and how it indoctrinates followers. They describe followers of the group as Moonies, a term seen as derogatory.
