Over 2,500 couples assembled in South Korea to be joined in Holy Matrimony, the event took place on Wednesday, the 12th of February, 2014.
Couples had to travel down to Seoul to take part in the ceremony.
One of the couples, Ilseuk Masuda and Rachel Curtin came from the United States – the groom wore a red tie; while the bride was adorn in a traditional white gown.
The couple’s parents, who were also married through the Church,
exchanged vows in a mass wedding in New York in 1982. Their children are
proud to follow in their footsteps.
“From an American culture stand point it’s not normal to be married with
hundreds of other couples, but really objectively we don’t think it’s
that strange,” Masuda said.
Sun Myung Moon, a media and business mogul turned self-styled
messiah, founded the church in 1954 in Seoul. He preached new
interpretations of lessons from the Bible, raising eyebrows for what
critics have characterized as a cult.
The church gained fame in the 1970s and 80s for holding mass weddings
of thousands of followers. The first mass weddings began in the early
1960s, with the numbers of couples participating mushrooming over the
years. In 1997, 30,000 couples tied the knot in Washington, and two
years later around 21,000 filled the Olympic Stadium in Seoul.
Moon was often the one who matched up couples from different
countries for the Church’s nuptials, in a bid to build a multicultural
religious world—even when, in some instances, the paired couple didn’t
share a common language. Since Moon’s death in 2012, his 70-year-old
widow, Hak Ja Han, has been presiding over the ceremonies.
See more pics after the cut...
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