Rev. Moon, PWPA Founder, Dies at 92

Gordon L. Anderson
September 5, 2012

Remaining True to Our Pledge

Rev. Moon presenting “PWPA and Our Resolution,” Dec. 18, 1983

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon died early Monday morning, September 3, in South Korea. He was 92. We want to thank those scholars who have written to express condolences on his passing, and to issue a statement on behalf of Professors World Peace Academy (PWPA).

Rev. Moon’s numerous international humanitarian and multi-cultural contributions include the founding in Korea in 1973 of the PWPA and in 1983 the founding of PWPA-International. He encouraged and contributed substantially to several major international conferences and publications addressing critical global political, societal, and cultural issues. These included a conference on the coming collapse of the Soviet Union, held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1985, a conference the Future of China held in 1987, a conference on the Future of Liberal Democracies in 1989, and another on the Future of the Family held in 1995.

In December 1983, on short notice after an International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, Reverend Moon called high ranking scholars from 72 countries to organize PWPA International. Gathered in Seoul, they issued a document titled “Our Resolution and Pledge” in which they proclaimed their resolve to work with the Rev. Moon “towards the establishment of a God?centered world of universal fellowship and harmony in which the terrible wounds of the past arising from differences of history, culture, nationality and race will be bound up and healed.”

Reverend Moon Addresses the Mission of PWPA at the Little Angels School in Seoul, Korea

Following that gathering, Reverend Moon spoke to the new PWPA leadership and others gathered at the Little Angels School, in Seoul, Korea, a school for culture and the arts which he founded, giving them his vision for PWPA. Excerpts that encapsulate this vision follow:

I am pleased to have this opportunity to share with you some of my convictions on the occasion of this International Congress of PWPA. I have long thought that in addition to their scientific achievements, scholars must be pioneers in the realm of conscience, inspiring mankind by their bold and determined actions… I founded the PWPA to be a trailblazing organization at this critical moment in human history, able to mobilize those intellectuals who have devoted their lives to the advancement of human wisdom and enable them to play a leading role in overcoming the dangers of the age and opening new pathways to world peace. The ultimate goal of PWPA is to help create a just and harmonious world order by encouraging scholars to search for new ideas and methods of achieving peace and prosperity. The PWPA should provide scholars and other concerned leaders with the resources they need to solve the fundamental problems facing humanity. I believe that the PWPA should be international, multidisciplinary, future-oriented and action-oriented. No single discipline, no local prescription, can solve the problems facing humanity in this century. Mutual cooperation beyond national and regional boundaries and interdisciplinary study beyond limited specializations are absolutely necessary.

If the world is to overcome its many problems, it needs leaders. I sincerely hope that the members-scholars of the PWPA will participate actively, not passively, in the search for and realization of universal human ideals. The PWPA exists not only for the advancement of the sciences, but also for the practical promotion of the well-being of mankind, thereby differing from most other scholarly institutions. Its members should become social activists, orienting their students in a positive direction, seeking to influence public opinion and playing a leading role in public affairs. I encourage you to grapple, in a non-violent manner, with the most difficult and pressing social and philosophical issues of the age, in order to provide humanity with the leadership it needs to cope with the seemingly insoluble problems it faces…

It is an absolute requirement in this era that education for the coming generation be shaped by the firm moral convictions of their professors, who must communicate a clear sense of values. This must be the basic attitude of educators. From this point of view, the role of a professor is the same as that of a religious leader. We educators must assume the responsibility not only for transmitting facts, but also for sharing with our students the meaning and purpose of human life.

In the nearly 30 years that have passed since Rev. Moon provided this vision to PWPA leaders, the world has changed significantly: the Soviet Union has collapsed. China has become an economic powerhouse. Many of the newly indigenous regimes replacing the former colonial powers in Asia and Africa have not fared well politically and several of the established liberal democracies have been burdened with unsustainable debt and suffer from out-of-control bureaucratic expansion.

Professors from 72 nations sign “Our Resolution and Pledge”

During the same years, PWPA chapters were established in over 100 countries, hundreds of conferences have been held, and countless books and other publications have been prepared and issued under PWPA sponsorship. The International Journal on World Peace has become an established journal in the field of peace studies.

Today Reverend Moon’s vision and hopes need to be applied to contemporary problems more than ever. On his passing, PWPA wishes to reaffirm its commitment to the vision and mission set before it, and express its thanks to its Founder for his generous spiritual and material contributions. It is incumbent upon the PWPA today to vigorously continue its several initial missions for advocating the causes of global and inter-religious tolerance and understanding, eradicating poverty and suffering, and challenging the growing scientific knowledge to better serve the causes of societal progress and peace.

Signed:

Dr. Morton A. Kaplan, Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago

Dr. Neil Albert Salonen, President, University of Bridgeport

Dr. Gordon L. Anderson, President, Paragon House Publishers

Dr. Hugh D. Spurgin, President, Bridgeport International Academy

Larry Orman, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, University of Bridgeport

Frank Grow, President, CEO Focus Chesapeake

Professor Nicholas N. Kittrie, KStJ, The Eleanor Roosevelt Institute for Justice & Peace, Washington D.C.

Rev. Moon, Religious and Political Figure, Dies in South Korea at 92

The CNN Wire Staff
September 3, 2012

(CNN) -- The Rev. Sun Myung Moon -- a controversial religious and political figure who founded the Unification Church, a major institution in East Asia and beyond that gained fame decades ago for its mass weddings -- died early Monday in South Korea, the church said.

The Universal Peace Federation said on its website that Moon died early Monday morning of complications related to pneumonia. He was 92.

"Our True Father passed into the spiritual world at 1:54 AM Monday, September 3rd, Korea time," a message on a Unification Church English-language website said.

His funeral will be held on September 15 after nearly two weeks of mourning, the church said in a statement. Moon's mortuary will be open for visitors to pay respects from Thursday until the funeral, it said.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, died early Monday morning in South Korea. He is seen delivering a speech during his 91st birthday party in Gapyeong, South Korea, on February 8, 2011. Moon, pictured in an undated headshot, was imprisoned in North Korea during the Korean War before being freed by the allies. He was a strong supporter of Republican politicians in the United States. Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, visit Britain in March 1972. More than 1,000 Korean and Filipino couples attend a mass wedding ceremony in Manila on January 23, 1996. Moon led the Unification Church, which gained fame worldwide for its mass weddings. A Japanese devotee holds a portrait of his bride, who couldn't join in the mass wedding event at the Olympic Stadium in Seoul on February 13, 2000. Moon married some 30,000 couples at the event. Moon and his wife bless the brides and the grooms during the ceremony in Seoul. Followers of the Unification Church are sometimes referred to as "Moonies." As founder of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, Moon speaks during a meeting with 2,500 clergy in Washington on April 16, 2001. He was on a national unity tour. Moon toasts with his family members during his 91st birthday party in 2011. Moon and his wife oversee a mass wedding of 5,200 couples on March 24 in Gapyeong. The Unification Church performed its first mass wedding in 1961 with 33 couples. Newlyweds celebrate during the ceremony n Gapyeong earlier this year. Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, watch the newly married couples dance a waltz. Moon speaks during the opening ceremony of the Peace Cup match between Seongnam Ilhwa Chunma and Sunderland on July 19 in Suwon, South Korea. His Sunmoon Peace Football Foundation organizes the preseason soccer tournament.

"Rev. Moon died from overwork, from frequent trips aboard, including to the U.S., and from morning prayers which caused respiratory disease," Ahn Ho-yeol, a church spokesman said.

He will be buried on Mount Cheonseong in the northern South Korean province of Gyeonggi. In its statement, the church described the mountain as the "holy land" of the church.

The Washington Times, one of several publications that Moon founded, similarly reported Moon's death.

"Words cannot convey my heart at this time," Thomas P. McDevitt, the Times' president, said in a story on the newspaper's website. "Rev. Sun Myung Moon has long loved America, and he believed in the need for a powerful free press to convey accurate information and moral values to people in a free world."

McDevitt added that the Times is a "tangible expression of those two loves." In 2010, the newspaper was sold to a group operating on Moon's behalf, according to a statement on the paper's website.

Doctors put Moon in intensive care in a Seoul hospital last month after he fell ill, said Ahn, the church spokesman, at the time. Physicians then gave him a 50% chance of survival.

Days later, one of his sons, the Rev. Hyung Jin Moon, noted in a sermon posted on a church website that his father had multiple health problems in recent years, including heart surgery performed in the United States about 10 years ago. But still, he pushed on with his life's mission.

"Father, who is responsible to save the world, pushed himself way beyond his limits," said the son, who himself has a leading role in the church.

Moon had been a high-profile international evangelist for decades, having said that Jesus Christ came to him in the 1930s and "told him to finish (Jesus') mission," according to James Beverley, a professor at the Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto.

The Unification Church believes Jesus was divine but that he is not God, a stance that puts it outside the bounds of traditional Christianity. Followers regard Moon as the messiah.

His church officially started in the 1950s, with missionaries being dispatched around the world by the end of that decade. His was one of several religious movements that emerged after World War II and the Korean War in South Korea and Japan, drawing from "a tremendous pool of people ... looking for answers as to why the world had turned (against them)," said Virginia Commonwealth University professor David Bromley.

Globally, the church's reach may have peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s, as hundreds of thousands joined the singular religious movement, said Beverley. Critics have said the controversial Moon leads a cult whose followers were colloquially known as "Moonies."

"Rev. Moon demanded a lot of members -- a lot of (them) left their families and they lived very sacrificially, especially in the 1970s," said Beverley. "Moon claims to be the true father of humanity, (and) his wife is the true mother." Today, the professor estimates that the Unification Church has hundreds of thousands of followers still in South Korea and Japan, with far fewer elsewhere around the globe.

In his role as church leader, Moon is famous for conducting mass weddings, including one in 1982 at New York City's Madison Square Garden and one in 1995 in South Korea uniting 360,000 couples.

"It was his way of emphasizing the importance of the family, plus all these couples get married under his blessing and that is basically their path to heaven," said Beverley.

Arranged matches are a common practice for members of the Unification Church. Howard Self, a spokesman for organizers of a 1997 mass ceremony at Washington's Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, said after that event that those blessed by Moon could then be legally married later "in their own countries."

"Even before you're matched, you know that you're going to base your relationship on internal aspects because you don't know what the person's going to look like," said a man before his 1997 union to a woman he had met less than a week earlier.

Moon has had influence in other ways as well. He grew a massive, diverse business empire -- including holdings in industries such as chemicals, arms manufacturing, mining and pharmaceuticals -- at the same as his church grew, providing him with wealth "that allowed him to ... pursue his religious agenda," said Bromley.

Even after his church's membership in the United States dwindled in recent years, Moon stayed relevant by appearing frequently and sponsoring events for journalists, politicians, scientists and others at which he sometimes offered high-profile individuals large amounts of money to appear, noted Bromley.

He also helped create news publications, universities, religious institutions and other groups. Some such organizations Moon founded stress interfaith dialogue and peace, like the Universal Peace Federation, which advocates "building a world of peace in which everyone can live in freedom, harmony, cooperation and prosperity."

He's also run into trouble with the law, serving a federal prison term in the United States for tax evasion. From 2003 to 2005, the British government prohibited him from traveling to that country, according to a U.S. State Department report.

Still, Moon continued to be regarded highly elsewhere -- including in Washington.

A video from 2004, posted on the website of what was then known as the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, showed a ceremony taking place in a U.S. Senate office building attended by Moon and several members of Congress. Speaking Korean, Moon declares himself the messiah and says he'd spoken to the spirits of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, both of whom he said found strength in his teachings and mended their ways.

Rep. Danny Davis, D-Illinois, is seen reading a poem and wearing white gloves and carrying a crown on a pillow to Moon and his wife. Davis said later he thought it was all part of an interfaith peace ceremony, adding that Moon didn't ask his "permission to call himself the messiah."

Moon was traditionally a strong supporter of Republican politicians, including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, said Eileen Barker, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

He was also known for being "virulently anti-communist," having been imprisoned in North Korea during the Korean War before being freed by the allies, she said.

Moon softened his hard line on North Korea, though, over time -- even meeting North Korea's founder (and grandfather of its current leader), the late Kim Il Sung, and investing money in the north. He also took pride in talking with Mikhail Gorbachev before the Soviet Union's collapse, calling such meetings a part of the unification movement that connects with the "messiah" and therefore was part of "the restoration," according to Bromley.

In the sermon from August 19 posted online, the Rev. Hyung Jin Moon talked about his father's illness and praised his efforts over the years, as well as stating some of the family's political positions as regards China, Russia and others.

The younger Moon also made a point to thank those who have been praying for his father's health.

"We need to remember, father is not just a normal person," said the Rev. Hyung Jin Moon. "Father's body is not just a normal body."

Unification Church Founder Sun Myung Moon Dies Aged 92

Ju-min Park
September 3, 2012

Leaves vast religious organisation, business empire

Funeral set for Sept. 15

GAPYEONG, South Korea, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Sun Myung Moon, a self-declared messiah who founded the controversial Unification Church which has millions of followers around the globe, died on Monday leaving a vast business empire and a legacy of mass weddings.

Church officials said Moon, 92, who had suffered complications from pneumonia, was taken to hospital in Seoul in mid-August and was moved to a hospital in a rural retreat last week when his family believed there was little chance of recovery.

His body was lying in a vast building resembling the White House at the retreat in rugged hills about an hour outside the South Korean capital of Seoul. The funeral will be on Sept. 15, after which he will be buried at the retreat.

Moon had led an active public life until recently, officiating a mass wedding for 2,500 in March and leading a service of more than 15,000 followers in July.

Critics have for years vilified the church as a heretical and dangerous cult and questioned its murky finances and how it indoctrinates followers, described in derogatory terms as "Moonies."

Moon is survived by his wife - the pair are called "true parents" by followers - and 10 of their 13 children.

Religious experts say Moon will remain at the centre of the church, keeping it together despite signs of previously unimaginable fissure among his sons, according to a creed that had been prepared since a helicopter crash four years ago that nearly killed Moon and his wife.

Born in what is now North Korea in 1920, Moon founded the church soon after the Korean War that ended in 1953, rapidly expanding the ministry internationally and building a business at the same time that served as the backbone of the empire.

The Unification Church runs the Segye Times newspaper in South Korea and more than a dozen other firms along with overseas businesses, including the conservative Washington Times.

"The Unification Church will continue to be in good shape even after Sun Myung Moon's death," said Tark Ji-il, who teaches church history at the Busan Presbyterian University.

"The Unification Church is not simply a religious organisation, but is a commercial organisation built on religious conviction."

Moon "Met Jesus"

Moon's farming parents followed the Presbyterian Church, a branch of Protestant Christianity. When he was 15, he said, he met Jesus, who appeared to him as he prayed in the hills and asked him to take on the work of building God's kingdom on Earth.

Moon refused twice, according to a biography by Mike Breen, former journalist for the Washington Times.

"Jesus asked him a third time. 'There is no one else who can do this work.' ... From the comfort of his youthful ideals, he peered over the abyss of the difficulties that would lie ahead and decided. 'I will do it,' he promised."

Moon had handed over day-to-day operations of the church, which has its headquarters in Seoul, to one of his sons and the management of the Tongil Group with interests in construction, resorts, travel agencies and the newspaper to another son.

Church officials and followers alike rejected the idea that the man who proclaimed himself a messiah would be reincarnated.

"The church teaches us, dust to dust, and it's the soul that goes to heaven, and so is the law, the truth and order of things, which is why all humans come and go," said Lee Sang-bo, a life-long follower of the church who said he was married at a mass wedding in 1982.

"And a messiah is no exception."

Moon was known as a strident anti-communist and visited North Korea in 1991 to meet the reclusive state's founder, Kim Il-sung, to discuss business ventures and unification, a visit condemned by South Korea which remains technically at war with the North.

He also courted controversy in his business life and served prison term in New York after a 1982 conviction on tax evasion charges

Sun Myung Moon Dies at 92; Led Controversial Unification Church

Elaine Woo
September 3, 2012

South Korean immigrated to the U.S. and became the wealthy leader of an unorthodox religious movement that was labeled a cult and featured mass marriage ceremonies.

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed Messiah from South Korea who led the Unification Church, one of the most controversial religious movements to sweep America in the 1970s, has died. He was 92.

Moon, who had been hospitalized with pneumonia in August, died Monday at a hospital in Gapyeong, South Korea, church officials announced.

Although greeted as a Korean Billy Graham when he arrived in the United States four decades ago, Moon gradually emerged as a religious figure with quite different beliefs, whose movement was labeled a cult and whose followers were mocked as "Moonies." 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.

Moon offered an unorthodox message that blended calls for world peace with an unusual interpretation of Christianity, strains of Confucianism and a strident anti-communism. He was famous for presiding over mass marriage ceremonies that highlighted Unification's emphasis on traditional morality.

What also made Moon unusual was a 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 owned United Press International.

Moon was "the object of more suspicion and enmity than almost any other contemporary religious leader," Eileen Barker, an authority on the Unification Church and new religions at the London School of Economics, wrote some years ago.

The short, balding immigrant evangelist was not charismatic in the usual sense. He spoke poor English and gave few interviews. His sermons, delivered through interpreters, rambled on for hours and often exhorted 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.

His religious journey purportedly began 16 years after his birth on Jan. 2, 1920, in what is now North Korea. According to biographical accounts, Jesus appeared to the young Moon on a Korean mountaintop on Easter Sunday in 1936. From this meeting Moon divined that his job was to complete Jesus' mission of creating heaven on Earth.

During high school in Korea and at Waseda College in Tokyo, where he studied electrical engineering, Moon claimed to receive more messages from spiritual figures, including Buddha and Moses. He later said that Buddha told him to seek the unification of world religions "in a common effort to salvage the universe."

After World War II, Moon founded a church and began preaching full-time, often speaking out against communism. His strong political stands caused problems with the North Korean government, which jailed him on charges of bigamy and draft evasion. He was freed in 1950.

In 1954, he founded the Holy Spirit Assn. for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul. Three years later he published "The Divine Principle," the main text of his church.

Unification theology is complex, but a central tenet is to right the wrongs of Adam and Eve. According to the Divine Principle, Satan seduced Eve, who then had illicit relations with Adam and spawned impure children.

Moon regarded Jesus as the second Adam, but Jesus was crucified before he could marry and bring forth sinless progeny. Thus, according to Moon, mankind's salvation depended on a third savior to appear on Earth and marry a pure woman. Together they would become the "true parents" of mankind and beget pure families to populate the kingdom of God.

The new Christ, Moon prophesied, would be born in Korea.

Moon's beliefs did not go over well with leaders of mainline Christianity. He was turned down when he applied for membership to the major ecumenical organizations, the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.

"His theology was heretical," said David Bromley, a Virginia Commonwealth University sociologist who co-authored "Moonies in America," a major study of the Unification movement during its peak in the 1970s.

Church members addressed Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, as the "True Parents," a title that outraged many of the actual parents of Moon's followers. The Moons moved to the U.S. in 1971 and eventually lived in a 35-room mansion on an estate in Irvington, N.Y.

Moon's first marriage, to Choe Sung-kil, ended in divorce in 1957. He had a son with her and another with Kim Myung-hee, who lived with Moon during the 1950s. In 1960 he married Han, then a young disciple. They had 14 children, of whom 10 survive him. He was believed to have more than 40 grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren.

Had Moon restricted his recruiting to ethnic Koreans, he might have avoided criticism, Bromley said. But the church began targeting white middle-class youths on or near college campuses, a tactic also pursued by two other sects that attained notoriety in the 1970s, the Children of God and the Hare Krishnas.

An anti-cult movement rose in opposition to the groups and created a market for "deprogrammers" who abducted church members and tried to reverse the brainwashing they believed was fundamental to the cults' influence.

Moon promoted interracial and intercultural marriages and arranged thousands of unions. Couples matched by the church were instructed to refrain from having intercourse for 40 days, partly to ensure that the unions were based on "pure love" rather than carnal desire. In one of the church's most publicized events, Moon blessed 6,500 couples in New York's Madison Square Garden in 1988.

Followers were expected to live communally under austere conditions, although the church later moved away from group living as members matured and started their own families. Each member also was expected to raise money for the church, often by peddling flowers or other innocuous items at airports and shopping malls.

In 1978 Congress investigated the church as part of a broader probe into Korean influence-buying. A congressional subcommittee concluded that Moon's organization had violated U.S. tax, immigration, banking and currency laws. In 1982 he was convicted on tax evasion charges and served 11 months in a federal prison in Danbury, Conn.

That year, he launched the Washington Times, which positioned itself as a conservative alternative to the Washington Post. It won loyal readers in the White House and among conservative strategists but has been a chronic money-loser, surviving on more than $2 billion in subsidies from the church. Circulation fell to about 40,000 daily copies in 2010, when a family feud caused the patriarch to repurchase the paper after having given control of it four years earlier to his eldest son, Preston.

Times special correspondent Jung-yoon Choi in Seoul contributed to this report

Sun Myung Moon Dies at 92; Washington Times Owner Led the Unification Church

Emma Brown
September 2, 2012
The Washington Post

Sun Myung Moon, a self-professed messiah who claimed millions of religious followers in his Unification Church and sought to become a powerful voice in the American conservative movement through business interests that included the Washington Times, has died. He was 92.

The Washington Times reported that Mr. Moon died in South Korea early Monday morning (Sunday afternoon in Washington). Unification Church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul told the Associated Press that Mr. Moon died at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong, northeast of Seoul. He had been under treatment for pneumonia.

Officials say the religious leader who founded the Unification Church and built it into a multibilliondollar business empire has died in South Korea at age 92.

Mr. Moon, the son of Korean farmers, created a sprawling empire at the intersection of religion and business and became one of the world’s most enigmatic and polarizing public figures.

His stated ambition was to rule the world and replace Christianity with his own faith, which blended elements of Christianity, Confucianism and Korean folk religions. A leading symbol of the 1970s cult wars in America, he attracted a great deal of attention and ridicule for holding mass weddings for Unificationist couples whom he had paired, often without the prospective partners ever having met.

But his success in business and involvement in American politics “demanded that people who could care less about his peculiar doctrinal views pay attention to him,” said James Beverley, a professor at Tyndale University College and Seminary in Toronto who has studied Mr. Moon’s church since the late 1970s.

As a young man, Mr. Moon was twice jailed in the 1940s when his sermonizing attracted the attention of authorities in what is now North Korea. Emerging as a staunch anti-communist, he built the foundations of what became a global business network with labor provided by his devotees.

He made his most strident inroads into American culture in the 1970s. The Vietnam War-era counterculture was beginning to fade, but college students were still looking for an alternative to the conventional lives of their parents. Drawn by the promise of salvation through clean-living self-discipline, they flocked to the Unification Church despite the fact that Mr. Moon was known more for his sermons’ longwindedness than for public displays of charisma.

His critics described him as a frustrated megalomaniac who donated millions of dollars to political causes in exchange for the mainstream recognition and acceptance that he never enjoyed as a spiritual leader. Meanwhile, his supporters saw Mr. Moon as a prophet unfairly persecuted by xenophobic journalists and politicians.

To much of the outside world, Mr. Moon undercut his credibility with grandiose statements. “God is living in me and I am the incarnation of himself,” he said, according to sermon excerpts printed in Time magazine in 1976. “The whole world is in my hand, and I will conquer and subjugate the world.”

Such comments helped spur a panic among parents of young Unificationists, who accused Mr. Moon of running a cult and brainwashing their children. Unificationists often lived communally and were forced to sever ties with their families, trading biological mothers and fathers for their “True Parents,” Mr. Moon and his wife. They staked out street corners and airports and worked long hours selling flowers, peanuts and candles to raise money for the church. Alarmed parents hired professional deprogrammers to bring their children home.

In 1982, Mr. Moon was convicted of tax evasion and later sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in Danbury, Conn. In addition, his $46 million foray into movie production — “Inchon,” a 1981 film about the Korean War featuring Laurence Olivier as Gen. Douglas MacArthur — was unanimously deemed an epic failure.

By the mid-1980s, Mr. Moon’s recruitment efforts in America had begun to flag. The National Council of Churches had rejected Unificationism, calling it “incompatible with Christian teaching and belief.” Congress had investigated Mr. Moon’s connections with the South Korean CIA and issued a report damning his businesses as a global network designed to further the growth of a religious cult.

Officials say the religious leader who founded the Unification Church and built it into a multibilliondollar business empire has died in South Korea at age 92.

Despite those setbacks, Mr. Moon remained at the helm of a dizzying web of hundreds of businesses and nonprofit organizations that reached into the lives of millions of people around the world and exerted a powerful influence on American politics.

In addition to South Korean businesses that ran the gamut from ginseng tea to machine guns, his sprawling empire included an automobile plant and hotel in North Korea and banks and vast tracts of real estate in South America. In Japan, an army of salespeople sold ornamental pagodas and other religious trinkets.

In the Washington area, the church and its affiliates owned more than $300 million in commercial, political and cultural enterprises, including the Kirov Academy of Ballet in the District, an Alexandria video production firm called Atlantic Video and the mall jewelry store chain Christian Bernard.

Mr. Moon’s groups owned a university in Bridgeport, Conn., a recording studio and travel agency in Manhattan, a horse farm in Texas and a golf course in California.

The preacher also built a vast seafood enterprise that includes fishing boats, processors and distributors from Alaska to Gloucester, Mass. According to a 2006 Chicago Tribune investigation, Mr. Moon’s True World Foods provided most of the raw fish consumed at sushi restaurants in the United States.

Starting the Times

His most prominent investment was the Washington Times, founded in 1982 as a conservative counterbalance to what Mr. Moon perceived as The Washington Post’s liberal bias.

The broadsheet, whose circulation reached 100,000 at its peak, was a financial drain — it never climbed out of the red and soaked up about $1.7 billion in church subsidies during its first 20 years in business. But it quickly became an important national voice for the conservative right. President Ronald Reagan reportedly read it daily, and its reporters earned respect for scooping other media outlets, including The Post.

“Many comfortable Washington political bureaucrats who have had their beautiful offices inside big marble buildings considered Reverend Moon and the Unification Church as insignificant as peanuts,” Mr. Moon reportedly said soon after launching the paper. “However, now they have found themselves having to respond to the Washington Times. They are reading it and trembling at some of the stories.”

The Times earned praise and attention from conservative political leaders but battled a public perception that it was a mouthpiece for the Unification Church, particularly when top editors resigned, citing church interference with editorial decisions.

Mr. Moon and other church leaders were unabashed about their ambitions for the newspaper. “We are going to make it so that no one can run for office in the United States without our permission,” Col. Bo Hi Pak, Mr. Moon’s top aide and the founding president of the Times, reportedly told conservative activist David Finzer in 1988.

Officials say the religious leader who founded the Unification Church and built it into a multibilliondollar business empire has died in South Korea at age 92.

Mr. Moon’s long involvement with American politics began in the 1970s during the administration of President Richard Nixon, when the church leader said God had proclaimed that “Americans must love Nixon.” Unificationists prayed and fasted outside the U.S. Capitol during the Watergate hearings, earning the fallen president’s gratitude and a White House invitation for Mr. Moon.

He spent liberally to fight communism and champion traditional family values. In the 1980s, he and his followers founded Causa, an anti-communist group that promoted “Godism” as an alternative to Marxism and was active in more than 20 countries, including Uruguay, where it bought a newspaper, banks and a luxury hotel.

During the height of the Nicaraguan civil war in the 1980s, the Washington Times led a fundraising drive on behalf of the contras, a rebel group that sought to overthrow the country’s leftist government. Another church-linked organization, the American Freedom Coalition, paid for a direct mailing to 25 million households that criticized 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis.

Mr. Moon cultivated often-uneasy relationships with American political, cultural and religious leaders, who undoubtedly appreciated his largess but were often hesitant to publicly embrace the controversial preacher.

Former president George H.W. Bush spoke frequently at Moon events. He received an undisclosed amount from the church in speaking fees and a $1 million donation from the Times foundation to build a library for his papers. In Tokyo, before an audience of 50,000, he and wife Barbara appeared alongside Mr. Moon’s wife as she credited Mr. Moon with bringing about the fall of communism.

Comedian Bill Cosby tried to back out of a contract to perform at a 1996 convention in Washington when he learned that it had been organized by Mr. Moon’s Family Federation for World Peace; Moon’s lawyers convinced Cosby otherwise, and he appeared on a slate including former president Gerald R. Ford, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the civil rights activist Coretta Scott King.

Christian evangelist Jerry Falwell, who once likened Mr. Moon to “the plague,” appeared at Unificationist events as a supporter after a Moon-sponsored organization donated $3.5 million to rescue Falwell’s Liberty University from the brink of bankruptcy.

Some luminaries who agreed to appear at Moon-sponsored events said they had been duped. When President George W. Bush was sworn into office in 2001, the Washington Times Foundation hosted an interfaith prayer luncheon for 1,700 political and religious leaders, among them soon-to-be U.S. attorney general John D. Ashcroft and Southern Baptist Convention President James Merritt. Mr. Moon was honored at the event. “We had no idea the luncheon was hosted by Moonies,” Merritt told a reporter at the time.

Critics said Mr. Moon used such events to engineer photo opportunities that he later used to establish legitimacy with potential church recruits. He secured photographs of himself with Nixon, Gorbachev and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.

In 2004, he was photographed in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, wearing regal robes and a gold crown and flanked by members of Congress. The picture was taken after a ceremony in which Mr. Moon proclaimed before U.S. senators and representatives that he was “none other than humanity’s savior, messiah, returning lord and true parent.” That was a truth, he told the gathered crowd, that Stalin and Hitler had recognized in conversations from beyond the grave.

Officials say the religious leader who founded the Unification Church and built it into a multibilliondollar business empire has died in South Korea at age 92.

In fact, according to Mr. Moon’s sermons, Jesus also had spoken from the spirit realm and recognized Mr. Moon as the savior of humankind. So had Buddha, Muhammad and Satan, among others. Mr. Moon claimed he had found a wife for Jesus and blessed the couple’s marriage.

Mr. Moon’s supporters saw him as the victor in a long fight against injustice. He was jailed six times in four countries. His 1982 arrest for tax evasion in the United States elicited a cry of support from mainstream preachers, who said the government was meddling dangerously with religious affairs. Others said he was the victim of a racist witch hunt by the press and public. The tax bill he had failed to pay was less than $8,000.

Carlton Sherwood, a CNN reporter who took a job at the Washington Times to write an expose about Mr. Moon, instead wrote a 1991 book saying that nothing was amiss in the church.

“Congress, the courts, law enforcement agencies, the press, even the U.S. Constitution itself,” Sherwood wrote, were “prostituted in a malicious, oftentimes brutal manner, as part of a determined effort to wipe out this small but expanding religious movement.”

A Young Preacher

Sun Myung Moon was born in 1920 — Jan. 6, according to an official biography — in a rural part of what is now North Korea. When he was young, his parents converted to Presbyterianism, and Mr. Moon grew up as a Christian believer.

On Easter Sunday in 1935, according to Unification Church lore, he had a vision of Jesus, who asked Mr. Moon to create God’s Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. Mr. Moon agreed.

He wrote a 411-page gospel, the Divine Principle, in which he said he could save the world from Satanic forces by creating a sinless family. Unificationist followers could be saved by creating their own perfect marriages in ceremonies blessed by Mr. Moon.

In the early 1940s, Mr. Moon studied electrical engineering at Japan’s Waseda University. He returned to Korea in 1943, married Sang Il Choi and began his public ministry in what became North Korea after the country was partitioned in the aftermath of World War II. He was jailed twice there, the second time in a Soviet-style gulag, where he remained until advancing U.N. and U.S. troops freed him and his fellow prisoners in 1950, the first year of the Korean War.

He built his first church out of discarded cardboard boxes in the South Korean port city of Pusan. In 1954, he officially established his church, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, in Seoul. Three years later, Mr. Moon’s young South Korean businesses were taking off and he had spread his message about creating a peaceful new world to 30 Korean cities. Meanwhile, his first marriage ended in divorce. A relationship with another woman resulted in a child but no wedding. In 1960, he married Hak Ja Han, who bore 14 of Mr. Moon’s children and came to be known as True Mother.

Declaring that he was urged by God to spread his gospel to America, he moved to an estate in Tarrytown, N.Y., in the early 1970s. On multi-city speaking tours, he preached that the United States was a great nation that had lost its way and had descended into a crime-ridden godlessness. He could restore God’s presence, he said in hours-long sermons delivered in Korean and translated by an interpreter. Officials say the religious leader who founded the Unification Church and built it into a multibilliondollar business empire has died in South Korea at age 92.

Mr. Moon made national headlines in 1974 when he drew an overflow crowd for a sermon at New York’s Madison Square Garden. In September 1976, two months after the United States celebrated its bicentennial, he sponsored a “God Bless America” rally at the Washington Monument that drew 50,000 people, most of whom, the New York Times reported, “seemed to be there for the music and fireworks display.”

“This is a time for awakening,” Mr. Moon said. “America must accept her global responsibility. Armed with Godism, she must free the Communist world and, at last, build the Kingdom of God on Earth.” He railed against communism until the Soviet Union fell, then refocused his attention on moral decay. America, where he had become a permanent resident, was rife with it, he said. It was full of free sex, extreme individuality and homosexuals, which he condemned as “dung-eating dogs.”

An Empire Struggles

In 1998, a steady drip of stories about the dysfunctionality of the supposedly perfect Moon family reached a climax when Nansook Hong, the ex-wife of Mr. Moon’s son Hyo Jin Moon, published a tell-all memoir. “In the Shadow of the Moons” accused Hyo Jin of cocaine addiction and domestic abuse and alleged that Mr. Moon was himself guilty of adultery and money laundering.

In 1999, another son, Young Jin Moon, fell from the 17th floor of a Reno, Nev., hotel. His death was ruled a suicide by the local coroner. A third son, Heung Jin Moon, was killed in a 1984 car crash; four years later, Mr. Moon announced that Heung Jin had been reincarnated in the body of a Zimbabwean church member.

Survivors include his wife; one child from his first marriage; and 10 children from his second marriage, including daughter In Jin Moon, who is trying to reinvigorate the American branch of the Unification movement, and three U.S.-educated sons who have led the Moon organization’s day-to-day operations since late 2009: Kook Jin “Justin” Moon, who founded a gun-manufacturing business in New York and now is chairman of Tong-il, the Moon family’s Korean business conglomerate; Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, who once honored his parents with 21,000 bows and now leads the church’s international ministry; and Hyun Jin “Preston” Moon, whose estrangement from his family has contributed to upheaval and nearinsolvency at the Washington Times.

Preston Moon took over the newspaper around 2006. But he feuded with his brothers and drew criticism from church insiders for his perceived lack of commitment to the Times’ conservative bent. The Moon family cut off the Times’ $35 million subsidy, sending the newspaper into a tailspin.

Its circulation dwindled and more than half its newsroom was laid off. The metro and sports sections were discontinued and top executives were fired, sparking questions about whether the paper would survive.

Mr. Moon and a team of former Times executives paid $1 to buy the paper back in November 2010, assuming its millions of dollars in debt.

Other parts of the Moon empire, always shrouded in secrecy, also seemed to teeter as Mr. Moon aged. In the 1980s, the church settled hundreds of lawsuits in Japan alleging that Unificationists persuaded people to buy religious icons by promising them spiritual powers; the lawsuits gutted what many believed to be the revenue engine of the global Moon network, which had brought in more than $400 million a year.

A church-related automobile manufacturing enterprise in China failed in the 1990s, and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s ravaged Mr. Moon’s South Korean businesses, forcing five of 17 into receivership.

Some Moon-related businesses, such as True World Foods, have remained profitable, according to news reports. But the organization’s financial troubles have rippled into the Washington area, where the Christian Bernard jewelry chain filed for bankruptcy in 2008. Church subsidies for the District’s Kirov ballet academy dropped by half in 2009.

The Unification Church itself has reportedly struggled as well. In an effort to boost membership, it loosened stringent rules about marriage, allowing biological parents to choose their children’s spouses and inviting nonbelievers to participate in mass weddings.

Church leaders claim millions of followers worldwide, but a 2009 Washington Times article reported that the church had 110,000 “adherents” worldwide. Scholars’ estimates of U.S. church membership range from fewer than 6,000 people to as many as 50,000, according to the 2009 edition of the Encyclopedia of American Religious History.

Frederick Sontag, a professor of religion who studied Unificationism for decades, once asked Mr. Moon whether his kingdom — so dependent on his own vision and force of personality — would crumble after his death.

“I will continue to lead the church,” Mr. Moon answered, “from the spirit world.”

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Times Founder, Dies at 92 - Led Religious Movement To Help Promote World Peace

Cheryl Wetzstein
September 2, 2012
The Washington Times

“I am a controversial person. The mere mention of my name causes trouble in the world,” Rev. Moon wrote in his 2009 autobiography, “As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen.”

The world “has associated many different phrases with my name, rejected me, and thrown stones at me. Many are not interested in knowing what I say or what I do. They only oppose me,” he wrote.

“Today, though, not even the slightest wound remains in my heart. … True love is a love that forgets it already gave love, and gives love again.”

Rev. Moon became widely known to Americans in the 1970s during his evangelistic rallies across the country, and major rallies at Yankee Stadium and the Washington Monument in 1976. America was in “moral decline,” Rev. Moon wrote in his autobiography, “and [I] played the role of a fireman responding to a call in an effort to reawaken its Puritan spirit.”

But accusations that his church “brainwashed” members helped make Rev. Moon the target of repeated investigations. In 1982, Rev. Moon was convicted of income-tax evasion and eventually served 13 months in federal prison.

Prolific Founder

Despite such hostility, Rev. Moon established and helped fund nonprofit organizations, including the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification and the Universal Peace Federation.

He also launched business interests in industries such as shipbuilding, industrial machinery, stoneware, fishing and seafood products, computer software, ginseng tea and other health products, soft drinks, arts and cultural schools, newspapers in several countries and car factories in China and North Korea. In 1992, the church rescued the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut from bankruptcy with a loan reported at $60 million.

A passionate fisherman, Rev. Moon inspired “Ocean Challenge” programs for youths and fishing tournaments in places such as Gloucester, Mass.; Alaska; and Hawaii. In 2011, he launched a marine company in Las Vegas to make a new kind of leisure craft.

Rev. Moon also founded numerous international, interfaith service groups, such as the International Relief Friendship Foundation, Religious Youth Service and Service for Peace, and sponsored thousands of conferences on world peace, family and interfaith issues. National leaders including former Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush addressed some of these conferences.

“My peace plan starts from the level of the individual,” Rev. Moon once said. “First we must find peace with God, then peace with our fellow man, and finally we can secure world peace.”

His belief in the divine significance of marriage was the rationale behind the Unification Church’s most famous events — the mass public “blessings” for both newlyweds (including church members whom Rev. Moon matched together) and married couples of all religions renewing their vows.

“What is the blessing? It is to possess God’s love, God’s son or daughter, and then all the universe,” Rev. Moon explained at a 1975 matching ceremony.

Early Years

Rev. Moon was born Jan. 6, 1920, in Sangsa Ri village in Pyongan province, now part of North Korea. His family members were poor farmers who joined the Presbyterian Church when he was 10. Rev. Moon embraced his conversion deeply and often lamented about the world of perpetual suffering he saw in Japanese-occupied Korea.

On Easter Sunday 1935, when he was 15, Rev. Moon would later say, he was praying on a Korean mountaintop when Jesus Christ appeared to him and asked him to fulfill his life’s work. Rev. Moon refused twice, but when Jesus asked him a third time to accept the mission, the teenager promised, “I will do it.”

For nine years, he studied, prayed and fasted to understand his mission. In 1943, he married his first wife, Seon-Gil Choi, and worked as an electrical engineer to support their son. But in 1946, he suddenly left his home to go to Pyongyang, North Korea, where Christianity and communism were colliding. He later said he was heeding God’s call.

There, he established himself as a spiritual leader, but was arrested after Christian clergy complained to police and accused him of being a spy from the South. During one arrest, he was tortured and left for dead outside the prison. His followers nursed him back to health.

In 1948, the same year he was expelled by the Presbyterians, Rev. Moon was arrested again by North Korean communists and imprisoned in the Heungnam labor camp.

Life expectancy in the camp was only a few months, but Rev. Moon persevered until 1950, when United Nations forces, under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, liberated the camp in October, on the eve of his scheduled execution. In the early 1980s, Rev. Moon financed the feature film “Inchon” to honor the U.S. war hero, who was played by Laurence Olivier.

In December 1950, Rev. Moon walked 500 miles south to Pusan, South Korea, where he and a small group of followers built a church from discarded U.S. military supply crates.

‘Divine Principle’

It was in Pusan where Rev. Moon committed his theology to writing, in a volume called “Wolli Wonbon,” or the “Divine Principle.” In that volume, based on years of intense biblical study, he explains that God, as the Original Parent of all mankind, has been grieving for His lost children since the Fall of Man.

The Divine Principle further explains the events of the Fall, the existence of evil, and how God has been working through human history to reclaim heaven and earth through a formula called the providence of restoration. God’s followers are called to live lives of true love, public service and work to bring peace among religions.

In 1953, Rev. Moon moved to Seoul where, the next year, he registered his church as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity — generally known as the Unification Church. By 1957, Unification churches were established in 30 Korean cities and towns. In 1958, the church’s first missionary went to Japan; in 1959, the first Unificationist missionaries arrived in America. He later sent missionaries to every country in the world.

Rev. Moon’s marriage to Seon-Gil Choi ended in 1958 after she filed for divorce.

In 1960, Rev. Moon married Hak Ja Han. The couple eventually had 14 children, and are revered by church members as the “True Parents.”

Beginning in 1960, Rev. Moon matched and married his earliest followers with their consent. The ceremonies, which the faithful believe release them from the bondage of original sin, grew to include 2,075 couples in Madison Square Garden in 1982. Over the years, these “blessing ceremonies,” the most recent occurring in March, have involved millions of couples either in stadiums or via satellite.

Rev. Moon first traveled to the United States in 1965 for a five-month visit, during which he toured the country and spent three months in the Washington home of Bo Hi Pak, a South Korean diplomat and Unification Church member. Rev. Moon returned to the U.S. in 1969 and, in 1971, moved the missionary headquarters of his church to Westchester County, N.Y.

In 1972, Rev. Moon began a seven-city U.S. evangelical tour with a “Day of Hope Rally” at New York City’s Lincoln Center. He continued his public appearances over the next two years, speaking on the theme of “Christianity in Crisis,” including a Sept. 18, 1974, event at Madison Square Garden in New York.

In November 1973, Rev. Moon had taken out newspaper ads urging Americans to “forgive, love and unite” in the face of the crisis created by the Watergate scandal. That led to a Feb. 1, 1974, Oval Office meeting between President Richard M. Nixon and Rev. Moon.

‘Brainwashing’ Charges

After Rev. Moon associated himself with Nixon, his religious movement began to be regarded as politically controversial. Critics began charging the Unification Church with “brainwashing” its members.

“Liberals in America, especially those who sympathized with international communism, felt particularly threatened by Rev. Moon’s appearance on the national scene,” Mr. Pak later wrote. “They feared that Rev. Moon could become a major threat, and so they came together to form an anti-Rev. Moon movement.”

During the 1970s, the Unification Church in America attracted many young adults. These converts often lived communally, witnessing, lecturing or raising money for the church’s projects. This attracted the attention of established religious organizations. Some parents of new members complained that the church prohibited contact between young converts and their families. In some cases, parents arranged to have young people abducted from Unification training centers and “deprogrammed.”

“I have never divided families or broken homes,” and the accusations of brainwashing are “nonsense,” Rev. Moon told theologian Frederick Sontag in a 1977 book about the church.

In 1977, a House subcommittee on international organizations began investigating the Unification Church. Rep. Donald Fraser, Minnesota Democrat, charged that the church was a lobbying organization for the South Korean government.

Although the congressional investigation failed to find any wrongdoing by Rev. Moon or the church, the Internal Revenue Service in 1981 obtained an indictment against Rev. Moon for income-tax evasion. The IRS charged that Rev. Moon failed to declare $112,000 in interest and $50,000 in corporate stock. Rev. Moon’s defense asserted that the assets were not Rev. Moon‘s, but were held in trust for the Japanese Unification Church.

A jury found Rev. Moon guilty of not paying about $7,500 of tax on interest income, and he was sentenced to 18 months in Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, a sentence he began serving in July 1984. With time off for good behavior, he was formally released Aug. 2, 1985, after serving 13 months. More than 2,000 clergymen welcomed Rev. Moon at a banquet in Washington that night.

‘Landslide’ Predicted

Even as he faced investigations and imprisonment, Rev. Moon embarked on a new aspect of his public career. He had declared that “only the United States can protect the democratic world against the threat of communism,” and warned that President Jimmy Carter’s “naivete” about that threat would soon lead to “world communization.”

His aide, Mr. Pak, later recalled that Rev. Moon prayed for an American president who would “stop the marching tide of communism,” and that Rev. Moon one day told him: “The next president of the United States will hold the fate of the world in his hands, and Heaven has chosen Ronald Reagan.”

Unification Church members actively supported the Reagan campaign in 1980 and, at Rev. Moon’s direction, Mr. Pak arranged a meeting with Reagan in Toledo, Ohio. Greeting the candidate as “President Reagan,” Mr. Pak recalled, he told the Republican challenger: “God has already decided on you as the next president.”

Reagan, according to Mr. Pak, was “taken aback” by the statement and asked him: “What did you say? Who on earth told you that?”

After he explained Rev. Moon’s prophecy, Mr. Pak said, Reagan responded with his characteristic humor: “I wish I had as much confidence in myself as Rev. Moon does.”

Opinion polls predicted a close election, but Rev. Moon’s confidence was reflected by the News World, a New York newspaper that he founded in 1976. On Election Day 1980, the News World rolled off the press with a giant headline predicting “Reagan Landslide.”

At a news conference that morning, Mr. Reagan held up the News World’s front page, an image carried across the country by television reports. When the votes were counted, the Republican had won 489 of 538 Electoral College votes, more than matching the bold prediction.

Going to Print

The News World, renamed the New York City Tribune in 1983, was Rev. Moon’s first venture into the American press, and in 1978, he established the World Media Association dedicated to promoting freedom of the press. When The Washington Star went bankrupt in 1981, Rev. Moon thought it was important to ensure that the nation’s capital remained a two-newspaper city.

Mr. Pak, who was then publisher of the News World, recalled that on Jan. 1, 1982, Rev. Moon ordered him to establish a daily to be named The Washington Times — to begin publication by March 1.

This seemed “an impossible mission,” Mr. Pak remembered.

Recruiting veteran editor James Whelan and purchasing a warehouse on New York Avenue that is still the newspaper’s headquarters, Mr. Pak was able to get a debut issue of The Times printed by Rev. Moon’s deadline of March 1. A little more than two months later, on May 17, 1982, The Times published its second issue and began regular daily publication.

One analyst predicted that the new daily would not “last more than six months,” but according to Mr. Pak, Rev. Moon invested more than $1 billion in The Times during its first 10 years of publication, and Unification Church members — including many with no previous newspaper experience — worked tirelessly with seasoned professional journalists to make it a success.

During its first 10 years of publication, The Times won more than 650 awards, including top honors from the Society of Newspaper Design in 1988 and 1992, and an editorial writing award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1989.

A favorite of Republican leaders (Reagan insisted on reading The Washington Times first thing in the morning at the White House), the newspaper scored scoops with its award-winning coverage of congressional scandals and the Whitewater scandal in the 1990s.

The Washington Times is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

Over the years, Rev. Moon was associated with a number of other publications, including the Segye Ilbo in Korea, Sekai Nippo in Japan, the Spanish-language weekly Tiempos del Mundo in Argentina, the Middle East Times in Cairo, Ultimas Noticias in Uruguay, and Washington Golf Monthly.

In 2000, News World Communications purchased the United Press International wire service. A weekly newsmagazine, Insight on the News, and a monthly magazine, The World and I, ceased publication in 2004, but continued as online publications.

‘Victory Over Communism’

Throughout the 1980s, Rev. Moon actively promoted opposition to communism, a struggle he saw in religious terms.

“The only way to defeat communism is to clearly prove the existence of God,” he said. He developed an anti-communist strategy he called Victory Over Communism (VOC), which critiqued the fallacies of Marxist theory while seeking to “demonstrate in detail how God guides human history.” VOC was the philosophical underpinning of CAUSA (Confederation of Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas), an organization that Rev. Moon established in 1980 to combat the spread of communism in Latin America. CAUSA seminars trained anti-communist leaders through South and Central America, and even sought to convert communist sympathizers.

Rev. Moon also advocated national security policies for free nations threatened by communism. In 1986, he established the International Security Council, which convened conferences of prominent geopolitical experts and senior officials from the United States, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and other nations.

The collapse of the Soviet empire gave Rev. Moon cause to celebrate what he called “an end to the most pernicious worldwide dictatorship in history.” He described the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union as “the results of God’s providence.”

He conveyed that message, but in a spirit of reconciliation, when he met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in April 1990 and with North Korean founder Kim Il-sung in December 1991.

Culture Warrior

Even as he celebrated the end of the Cold War, Rev. Moon focused on new struggles, calling for “a revival of spiritual culture.”

“The societies of free countries today are exhibiting a phenomenon that is every bit as evil as communism … the philosophy of materialistic humanism and … the extreme individualism and selfishness that are the offshoots of this philosophy,” he declared in 1992.

“The young people, whom we normally expect to become the future leaders, are losing touch with their consciences in a flood of immorality, drugs and crime, to such an extent that it is difficult for us to have hope in them as the leaders of the 21st century.”

To turn back that “flood,” Rev. Moon inspired a number of organizations for youths and for adults, including the Women’s Federation for World Peace, the American Family Coalition, the World Culture and Sports Festival, the Little Angels Performing Arts Center, the Il Hwa Chonma Soccer Team in Korea and the Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington.

In a 1997 speech, Rev. Moon called for “a true youth culture centering on true love” for the “supreme task” of combating “the social trends of moral degradation, including moral decadence and selfindulgence.” The struggle against those forces would, he said, “determine whether humanity will survive or be destroyed.”

He brought his efforts for international peace into academia and science. Beginning with the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences in 1972, the Professors World Peace Academy in 1973 and the Summit Council for World Peace in 1987, and through the Universal Peace Federation, founded in 2005, Rev. Moon underwrote thousands of conferences and forums as a way for scholars, activists and community leaders to resolve human problems.

He announced his idea of an International Peace Highway connecting Tokyo and London in 1981. In 2005, he proposed a bridge-and-tunnel project from Alaska to Russia.

Rev. Moon received numerous honorary doctorates, including a doctorate of divinity in 1985 from Shaw University.

His interfaith work in America, launched in the 1970s, has grown under the American Clergy Leadership Conference. Thousands of clergy from different religions, known as “ambassadors for peace,” have visited the Middle East to pray together and create a foundation for peace.

In 2007, Rev. Moon held a conference with delegates from 194 countries to pledge to create a “peace U.N.” to emphasize “living for the sake of others,” and in 2011 underwent another international speaking tour, mostly in Europe. He also worked to promote peace between North and South Korea.

“Since [the meeting with Kim Il-sung“] and continuing to this day,” Rev. Moon said in his autobiography, “we have maintained a special relationship with North Korea. … That is the importance of trust.”

Rev. Moon, who was 93 by Korean age calculations, is survived by Mrs. Moon, 11 children, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Several children preceded him in death.

Rev. In Jin Moon, the Moons’ third daughter and senior pastor of the Unification Church of North America, had been touring the country to speak about her father’s illness when he died.

“Before I left my father’s side, I held his hand as I normally do during the visits, and in my mind, I said, ‘Father, I’m going to take your love and your handshake back to all of the brothers and sisters who are praying for you.’ And it is really the heart of our True Mother as our mother to really thank you individually. I’m sure if she could be with you here today, that is exactly what she would do,” she told members at a Chicago service Aug. 29.

• Former Washington Times staff member Robert Stacy McCain contributed to this report.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon Dies at Age 92

UPI
September 2, 2012

SEOUL, Sept. 2 (UPI) -- The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, died early Monday in South Korea. He was 92.

Moon died at 1:54 a.m. at a hospital at the Cheong Pyeong church complex outside of Seoul of complications arising from pneumonia that led to the shutdown of other organs, including his kidneys, a church official said.

"I lament the passing of my father but I know that his spirit and legacy will live on," said Hyun Jin Moon, also known as Preston Moon, the Rev. Moon and Mrs. Moon's oldest living son. "His vision has inspired so many forward-thinking people to see beyond the barriers that divide humanity -- be they national, racial, or, most of all, religious.

"Sadly, some people, including many of his followers, see him merely as the founder of yet another church. Yet to me and countless others whom he has touched, his vision is so much greater than that. I will continue to work to give meaning and substance to his legacy."

Sun Myung Moon was born Feb. 20, 1920, in what is now North Pyongan province, North Korea, and established his first church in 1954. His following grew to an estimated 7 million members and he led large gatherings in which he conducted mass weddings for as many as 2,000 couples.

Moon was also involved with a series of charitable and business interests. Those include the Universal Peace Federation and the Peace Cup soccer tournament. The Unification Church also became involved with a series of business interests, which included founding The Washington Times newspaper; the Tongil Group, a South Korean chaebol (a chaebol is a Korean global conglomerate); and, for a time, ownership of United Press International.

Sun Myung Moon is survived by his wife Hak Ja Han Moon and 11 children.

Preston Moon is chairman of the UCI Group, which currently owns UPI.