Free Republic

A stunning 19th-century Seattle mansion, sold for $6 million, is set to be torn down because its last owners were the Moonies - members of the Unification Church. Nestled on the shores of Lake Washington, the three-story Spanish Mission revival mansion was once home to the family of early pioneers of Seattle, including Rolland Denny, the son of the city's founder, Arthur Denny. Later in the 1970s, it was purchased by the Unification Church when the religion was still in its infancy and served as a domicile for founders Sun Myung Moon, his wife, and their followers. Leonard Garfield, the...

The mother of the man arrested for the killing of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe is a member of the Unification Church, the church's Japan head said on Monday (Jul 11). A police investigation into the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe prompted the head of the country's branch of the Unification Church to confirm on Monday that the mother of the suspect in the killing is a member. Tetsuya Yamagami, an unemployed 41-year-old, has been identified by police as the suspect who approached Abe and opened fire during a campaign speech on Friday, an attack that...

TOKYO - The Unification Church in Japan on Monday (July 11) said the mother of the gunman who last week assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe was a member of the church. The gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, has told police following the assassination that he targeted Mr Abe in his belief that the former PM was linked to a "religious group" that his mother had joined, paying exorbitant dues that left his family bankrupt and broken. In a news conference on Monday, Reverend Tomihiro Tanaka - who leads the Japan branch of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification,...

Japanese voters went to the polls Sunday in the shadow of the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was gunned down while making a campaign speech. Abe's governing party appeared to be cruising to a major victory. As people voted, police in western Japan sent the alleged assassin to a local prosecutors' office for further investigation. A day earlier a top regional police official acknowledged possible security lapses that allowed the attacker to get so close and fire a bullet at the still-influential former Japanese leader. In a country still recovering from the shock, sadness and fear of...

Hundreds of World Peace and Unification Sanctuary church members get their guns blessed in Pennsylvania. Hundreds of couples packed a World Peace and Unification Sanctuary church in Pennsylvania to bless their weapons on Wednesday The church believes the gun is the "rod of iron" cited in the Book of Revelation A woman wears a crown of bullets in the ceremony in the rural Pocono Mountains Guns were blessed with holy water during the event, scheduled before 17 people were shot dead in a Florida school The church believes the Florida shooting could have been avoided had teachers been armed Guns...

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. Mr. Moon, the son of Korean farmers, created a...

GAPYEONG, South Korea (AP) -- Officials say the religious leader who founded the Unification Church and built it into a multibillion-dollar business empire has died in South Korea at age 92.

Gov. Jerry Brown tangled with a reporter from the conservative Washington Times newspaper after his meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Sunday. At one point Brown, who was defending his earlier tenure as governor and his efforts to bridge the state’s budget gap, asked the reporter: “Are you a Moonie?” The Washington Times was founded in 1982 by Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, whose followers were often referred to informally as Moonies. The Washington Times is a conservative paper, and Brown, after recognizing his interrogator, gave no ground. Brown’s spokesman Gil Duran joined...

Washington Times executives are negotiating to sell the newspaper, after the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's family cut off most of the annual subsidy of about $35 million that has kept the Unification Church-backed paper afloat, company officials said. Nicholas Chiaia, a member of the paper's two-man board of directors and president of the church-supported United Press International wire service, confirmed that the paper is actively on the market: "We recently entered into discussions with a number of parties interested in either purchasing or partnering with the Washington Times," he said in a statement to The Washington Post. Current and former...

Rev. Moon Marries Off Thousands of Followers Unification Church leader, 89, presides over another mass wedding The Rev. Sun Myung Moon has presided over numerous mass weddings over the years, including this one, attended by some 40,000, at Seoul's Olympic Stadium in 1992. ASAN, South Korea - Brides in white gowns and Japanese kimonos joined grooms in black suits and red ties Wednesday for the Unification Church's biggest mass wedding in a decade — a spectacle church officials say involves 40,000 people around the world. The "blessing ceremony" is the church's largest since 1999, and may well be the last...

The founder of the controversial Unification Church, better known as the Moonies, has been hurt in a helicopter crash in South Korea, reports say. Rev Sun Myung Moon, 88, was among several people on the aircraft when it made an emergency landing at Gapyeong, 40km (25 miles) east of Seoul. News agencies quoted officials as saying Rev Moon's injuries were slight. The casualties were taken to Cheongshim Hospital, which is owned by the Church, Yonhap news agency reported. A police spokesman said that the helicopter had been carrying Rev Moon, his wife Han Hak-Ja, 11 relatives and three crew members...

They thought becoming mail-order brides to South Koreans was their ticket to an affluent and comfortable life. The video shown to them by the broker featured smiling Filipino-Korean couples on their wedding day and ostensibly living in marital bliss in South Korea. But little did they know that a few months after the lavish weddings, the women would be divorced and forced to work in nightclubs or factories just to survive. 'It's sexual exploitation and they are using the marriage, which turns out to be fake, to exploit our women,' said Mr Romulo Asis, head of the National Bureau of...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Some 2,500 traditionally dressed brides from all over the world stood next to their blue-suited grooms in a packed stadium Saturday morning, as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon blessed their marriages, many of which he arranged himself. But singer Whitney Houston, who was to be a headliner at Moon's "Blessing '97" event, was a no-show, ... Promoters of the event released a statement saying Houston was "unable to perform due to a sudden illness." [...] Many other well-known people also canceled appearances they were to make ... after it became widely known the events were tied to...

President Bush has some new troops in his crusade to promote "healthy marriage" and teen celibacy with federal funds -- followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the controversial Korean evangelist and self-proclaimed new world messiah. At least four longtime operatives of Moon's Unification Church are on the federal payroll or getting government grants in the administration's Healthy Marriage Initiative and other "faith-based" programs. Two of those Moon associates were in Oakland last week leading dozens of local pastors and social workers enrolled in a "Certified Marriage Education Training Seminar" at the Holiday Inn next to the Coliseum. In some...

More than a decade ago, the World Media Association, a front group for Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, invited me to speak in Seoul, South Korea, at a conference on the press. At the time, I was the 36-year-old editor of the Sacramento Union, the oldest daily newspaper west of the Mississippi – and already creating fits for the establishment U.S. media.

Moon Over Washington Why are some of the capital’s most influential power players hanging out with a bizarre Korean billionaire who claims to be the Messiah? by John Gorenfeld, Contributor 6.09.04 Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah – with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building? The Washington Post didn't think so. For a moment...

Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com) - An interfaith group founded by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon is spearheading an effort to have Christian ministers remove crosses from their churches, calling them a symbol of oppression and perceived superiority. Mainstream Christian leaders call the request "outrageously bigoted." The American Clergy Leadership Conference (ACLC), an organization that began as a project of Moon's Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU), believes the key to "true and lasting peace in the Middle East" is reconciliation between members of the world's three largest religions. "Jews, Christians and Muslims must come together to heal divisions...