SEOUL, South Korea — Sun Myung Moon, revered as a messiah within his Unification Church but regarded by many others as a vain and enigmatic man who blessed mass weddings, built a sprawling business empire and presided over a personality cult, died Sept. 3 in South Korea. He was 92.
Moon had been in intensive care at a Seoul hospital since Aug. 7, according to his church. The cause of death was complications from pneumonia, including kidney failure.
He claimed to have received revelations from Jesus, Confucius, the Buddha, Lao Tzu and Satan.
After founding the Unification Church in 1954, Moon gained fame by holding group weddings for arranged couples, many of whom had barely met before Moon matched them. Ceremonies at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1982, Washington’s RFK Stadium in 1997 and Seoul’s Olympic Stadium in 1999, drew thousands of couples.
Moon taught that Jesus had died without fathering children, who, as the Messiah’s heirs, would have escaped the taint of Original Sin. Moon said Christ chose him to complete his mission by uniting humankind in a single sinless family. Many of Moon’s arranged marriages were thus interracial and international. Unificationists called Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han, the “True Parents” of this spiritually pure lineage.
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