Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church

For Unificationists, these interracial, interreligious and international mass marriage ceremonies symbolize the family as the hope for peace.

You see, Unificationists believe that all the problems on Earth, from the Gulf War, to child abuse, to the crumbling school system (you name it) are fruits of the fact that self-interest crept into the family, the love between husband and wife, reproductive affairs, and parent-child relationships, thus since the beginning there has never been even one family whose members were not dominated by some significant degree of self-interest.

[2]Scholars have noted the Blessing ceremony allows Unification Church members to express their belief in an international, inter-racial "family of God".

[4]The Blessing ceremony was first held in 1961 for 36 couples in Seoul, South Korea, by Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han, shortly after their own marriage in 1960.

[5] Later Blessing ceremonies were larger in scale but followed the same pattern with all participants Unification Church members and Moon matching most of the couples.

This liberalization led to a great increase in the number of Blessed couples, with most of them having been already married and not Unification Church members.

[13] Since 2001 Unification Church member couples Blessed by Moon have been able to arrange marriages for their own children, without his direct guidance.

[15] Non-Unificationists (people of other faiths, nonreligious) who believe in the ideals of the church teachings can also be part of the Marriage Blessing.

[16] There, it also describes the training and workshops one must go through to understand the value of the Blessing, become candidates and learn why marriage is the key for building God's Kingdom.

Moon presided over a Blessing ceremony in Washington, D. C., in which 28,000 of the 30,000 couples taking part were previously married,[7] including Baptist minister and civil rights advocate Al Sharpton and his wife Katherine.

[21] In a 2001 ceremony George Augustus Stallings, founder of the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation, married Sayomi Kamimoto, a Japanese Unification Church member.

[28] The Unification Church teaches that romantic love leads to sexual promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies.

More than half of female immigrants from the Philippines, Thailand and other countries came to Korea due to the Unification Church and less than 20% through marriage agencies.

[32] In 2009, a blessing ceremony for 7,000 couples was attended by the Vice Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea and by the daughter of the late President Park Chung Hee.

[34] Moon's practice of matching couples was very unusual in both Christian tradition and in modern Western culture and attracted much attention and controversy.

Following his marriage, the archbishop was called to the Vatican by Pope John Paul II, where he was asked not to see his wife anymore and to move to a Capuchin monastery.