Notable Events
In 1997 Rev. and Mrs. Moon presided over a Blessing ceremony in Washington D. C. in which 28,000 of the 30,000 couples taking part were previously married, including controversial Baptist minister and civil rights advocate Al Sharpton and his wife Katherine. A 2000 ceremony included couples in North Korea. In 2001 Roman Catholic Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo married Maria Sung, a Korean acupuncturist, in a Blessing ceremony presided over by Rev. and Mrs. Moon. In the same ceremony George Augustus Stallings, founder of the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation, married Sayomi Kamimoto, a Japanese Unification Church member. At the same ceremony was Minister Benjamin Muhammad, the national director of the Million Man March and the Million Family March and a representative of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. Former Ugandan President Godfrey Binaisa married Tomoko Yamamoto, a 58-year old Japanese woman during the Blessing ceremony in 2004. At that time, of the wedding, which took place remotely with Godfrey present over a satellite video link, he was 84 years old. A Blessing Ceremony was held at Headquarters of the United Nations in 2000.
Such weddings proved to be happy, according to scientific research. "Whatever anyone wants to say about the Unification Church, the marital aspect seems to work," said Robert Epstein, a research psychologist. No-divorce rates are up to 83% in the Unification Church. Unification Church teaches that romantic love leads to sexual promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies.
The Unification Movement affected the demographic map of mono-ethnic Korea due to its Blessing Ceremony. South Korea has an acute problem of gender imbalance. Consequently, there is a large shortage of marriageable women: more than half of female immigrants are from the Philippines, Thailand and other countries came to Korea due to the Unification Movement and less than 20% – through marriage agencies.
In 2009, a blessing ceremony for 7,000 couples was attended by the Vice Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea and by the daughter of the late President Park Chung-hee. She said: "I join in a trans-religious spirit. I like the Unification Church way of interpreting the Bible, incorporating the Quran and Buddhist scripts".
Read more about this topic: Blessing Ceremony Of The Unification Church
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