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SUNDAY REVELATIONS: The Messaih Passes On

The wake of Sun Myung Moon is well under way this weekend. Tens of thousands of believers are heading to the mountainous headquarters of the Messiah in South Korea for his funeral on Saturday.

The ceremony will be on the giant scale. Last week, work crews were laying a new road to bring mourners to the Cheongshim World Peace Centre where his body is lying in state under a domed glass screen. Memorial altars have been set up in local churches in 150 countries, it is claimed, and tens of thousands of followers are expected to make the trek to the Far East. At least 40 of the church’s 1,200 members in Britain will be among them.

Yesterday the church said that 13,000 people, including 3,000 Japanese, had already visited the memorial chapel. Famous for the mass weddings in which thousands of ready-made, mixed-nationality couples from all over the world were spliced simultaneously, the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity – the term the church prefers to “Moonies” – will not fail to give its “True Father” a worthy send-off.

Reverenc Sun Myung Moon died aged 92 on 3 September, but he insisted that his passing should not be a sad occasion – hence the presence of many female mourners dressed in white. “The word ‘death’ is sacred,” his sect’s media office quoted him as saying. “It is not a synonym for sadness and suffering. The moment we enter the spirit world should be a time we enter a world of joy and victory.” Those left behind, he declared, “should be shedding tears of joy instead of tears of sadness”.  abstracted from The Independent.