Sun Myung Moon - Blessing Ceremonies

Blessing Ceremonies

In 1961, Moon established the Unification Church wedding or marriage rededication ceremony, known as the "Blessing" which is given to married (or engaged) couples. The first blessing ceremony was held for 36 couples in Seoul, South Korea by the Moons shortly after their own marriage in 1960. All the couples were members of the church. Moon matched all of the couples except 12 who were already married to each other before joining the church. Even larger wedding blessings followed. In 1992, Moon gave the wedding blessing for 30,000 couples at the Seoul Olympic Stadium. Three years later he did it again for 360,000 couples, and in 2009, Moon presided over a Blessing ceremony for 40,000 people on the campus of the Sunmoon University; the ceremony was supported by Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Korea.

In 1986, the psychiatrist Marc Galanter reported that "Moon`s marriages proved to be happy." Another long-run research by psychologist Robert Epstein concluded that "arranged marriage in the Unification Church works as well as arranged marriages in other cultures and certainly far better on average than mainstream marriages in the United States". According to USA Today, "Moon teaches that romantic love leads to sexual promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies".

In 2001, a former Roman Catholic Church archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, was wed by Moon with a Unification Church member in a blessing ceremony.