The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who turned his
Unification Church into a worldwide religious movement and befriended
North Korean leaders as well as U.S. presidents, has died, church
officials say. He was 92.
Moon died Monday morning, Korea time, at a
church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong, 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.
Moon,
born in a town that is now in North Korea, founded his religious
movement in Seoul in 1954 after surviving the Korean War. He preached
new interpretations of lessons from the Bible.
The church gained
fame — and notoriety — in the 1970s and 1980s for holding mass weddings
of thousands of followers, often from different countries, whom Moon
matched up in a bid to build a multicultural religious world.
The
church was accused of using devious recruitment tactics and duping
followers out of money; parents of followers in the United States and
elsewhere expressed worries that their children were brainwashed into
joining. The church responded by saying that many other new religious
movements faced similar accusations in their early stages.
In
later years, the church adopted a lower profile and focused on building a
business empire that included the Washington Times newspaper, the New
Yorker Hotel in Manhattan, Bridgeport University in Connecticut, as well
as a hotel and a fledgling automaker in North Korea. It acquired a ski
resort, a professional soccer team and other businesses in South Korea,
and a seafood distribution firm that supplies sushi to Japanese
restaurants across the U.S.
The Unification Church claims millions
of members worldwide, though church defectors and other critics say the
figure is no more than 100,000.
