A Divine Insight

This week in history, May 10-16:

• True Father completes the original text of the Divine Principle (May 10, 1952)
• True Father receives an honorary Doctorate from Shaw University Divinity School (May 11, 1985)
• The first MEPI Pilgrimage begins (May 12, 2003)
• The New Yorker Hotel is purchased (May 13, 1976)
• “True Parents and the Completed Testament Age” speaking tour begins (May 13, 1993)
• The U.S. Supreme Court declines True Father’s appeal (May 14, 1984)
• 33 Couples’ Holy Blessing Ceremony is held (May 15, 1961)
• The Sun Myung Moon Christian Crusade kicks off (May 15, 1974)
• Citizens Federation for the Unification of the Fatherland is inaugurated (May 15, 1987)
• True Father begins a 17-nation speaking tour in South America (May 16, 1995)

May 10, 1952

True Father Completes the Original Text of the Divine Principle

Front cover of the original Divine Principle manuscript

In his autobiography, As a Peace-Loving Global Citizen, True Father states that he began writing the original version of Divine Principle (Wolli Wonbon) in a shelter for laborers in Pusan. This was in late April or May 1951. He continued writing it after he moved in August with Won Pil Kim, his first disciple, to a small hut they constructed on a hillside overlooking Pusan Harbor.  True Father spent much of his time writing on top of a large rock. He would write several pages a day and have Won Pil Kim read them back to him at night. Sometimes True Father worked by the light of a lantern in their hut. Won Pil Kim recounts that True Father woke him once in the middle of the night and dictated an entire section which Won Pil Kim recorded non-stop. True Father noted that on the day he finished writing Wolli Wonbon, he put his pencil down and prayed, “The moment has come for me to evangelize. Please send me the saints to whom I may give witness.” That very day, Hyun Shil Kang, a young female theological student, visited the hut to evangelize and became a follower. Copies of Wolli Wonbon circulated as hand-written manuscripts for several years until superseded by Wolli Haesul (Explanation of Divine Principle) in 1957.

May 11, 1985

True Father Receives Honorary Doctorate from Shaw University Divinity School

True Mother accepts an honorary doctorate on True Father’s behalf from Shaw Divinity School in North Carolina.

On May 11, 1985, Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, North Carolina, awarded True Father an honorary doctorate of divinity. The award was especially meaningful in that Shaw made the award while True Father was incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut. Dr. Joseph Paige, Shaw University’s executive vice president, later declared, “It was the first time that a major institution in America had been bold enough and honest enough and serious enough to honor this great leader.” He said True Father was being awarded for “his Christian leadership, his strong fight against communism and communist aggression, and his outstanding contribution in support of religious liberty, world peace, racial, economic and social justice, ecumenism and, more specifically, the unity of world Christianity.” True Mother accepted the award for True Father and delivered the acceptance speech. She stated that True Father shared with Shaw University and the Divinity School a commitment to international, interreligious and interracial harmony. 

May 12, 2003

The First MEPI Pilgrimage Tour Begins

At the height of the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and the beginning of the second Iraq War, True Parents launched what was to become the Middle East Peace Initiative (MEPI), a project initially of the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace and later of its successor, the Universal Peace Federation (UPF). The MEPI concept was based upon True Father’s vision of interreligious peacemaking and his conviction that the resolution of conflict, particularly in Israel, was integral to world peace. This was especially true for the Middle East. True Father believed that Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders needed to resolve their differences as a condition for the cessation of violence. This lay behind his call for Christian clergy to “take down the cross” and undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to be reconciled with their Jewish brethren. The first of the MEPI pilgrimages took place from May 12 to 19, 2003, and included 131 clergy. They traveled first to Rome, and then to Israel. They visited holy and historical sites at both locations. However, their main purposes were to bury the cross and reconcile, at least symbolically, with Jewish brethren, both of which they accomplished. Thousands of interreligious peacemakers traveled to the Holy Land under MEPI auspices between 2003 and 2014. MEPI events have included peace missions and fact-finding tours, service and youth activities, cultural programs, and conferences.

May 13, 1976

The New Yorker Hotel Purchased

The Unification Church purchased the New Yorker Hotel at Eighth Avenue and 34th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan on May 13, 1976. The 43-story, 1,083-room hotel, which first opened in 1930, is near Pennsylvania Station, Madison Square Garden, Times Square and the Empire State Building. Much like its contemporaries the Empire State Building (1931) and the Chrysler Building (1930), the New Yorker was designed in the Art Deco style popular at the time. When the 1 million-square-foot hotel opened, it contained 2,500 rooms, making it the city’s largest for many years and one of the most fashionable during the 1940s and 1950s. A pronounced decline in New York’s fortunes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, coupled with the construction of new, more modern hotels, caused the New Yorker to become unprofitable, and it was vacant for several years before being purchased by the church for a reported $5.6 million. It served as the Unification Church’s World Mission Center from 1976 to 1994. In 1994, the church converted a portion of the building to use as a hotel again. The New Yorker joined the Ramada chain in 2000 and the Wyndham chain in 2014. The New Yorker served as a staging area for the 1982 Holy Blessing of 2,075 Couples in Madison Square Garden and for many of True Parents’ speeches and providential activities.

May 13, 1993

“True Parents and the Completed Testament Age” Speaking Tour Begins

On January 10, 1993, True Father announced the transition that day “to the Completed Testament Era.” Three months later, on April 10, the Unification Church published a statement, “True Parents and the Completed Testament Age,” in the newspapers of 160 nations. The next month, on May 13, True Parents began a speaking tour of 33 U.S. cities under the same theme. True Father spoke in the first 12 cities from May 13 to 24. True Mother then covered 21 cities from May 26 to June 28. The tour was extended to include 23 additional cities during July, thereby covering all fifty states. True Mother delivered the address at the U.S. Capitol and the United Nations, which was a springboard to the world tour. She conducted 25 rallies in Japan, 40 in Korea, and another 40 in countries throughout the world.

The speech testified to “the establishment of the first True Family.” True Father declared: “My wife and I, together with our thirteen children and twenty-four grandchildren, are absolutely dedicated to serving God and humanity. With three generations in one family, we have achieved on the family level the central root, the central trunk and the central bud of the ‘Tree of Life’ mentioned in the Bible. It is our sincere hope that you will symbolically graft into this lineage by joining us in our efforts to create an ideal nation and world. This marks the beginning of the Completed Testament Age.”

May 14, 1984

U.S. Supreme Court Declines True Father’s Appeal

Harvard Law scholar Lawrence Tribe speaking on True Father’s court proceedings at the Federal Court House in New York.

In his book Inquisition, The Persecution and Prosecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Carlton Sherwood argued that True Father’s 1981 conviction on tax evasion charges was the result of “the most intensive and expensive criminal tax investigation of any religious figure in U.S. history.” However, the conviction had the effect of generating broad-based public support for True Father.  By April 1984, forty groups and individuals representing more than 120 million Americans had filed amicus curiae briefs in support of his appeal, including the National Association of Evangelicals, the National Conference of Black Mayors, the National Bar Association, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the attorneys general of Hawaii, Oregon and Rhode Island, Eugene McCarthy and Clare Boothe Luce. The Supreme Court’s refusal on May 14, 1984, to review True Father’s petition, despite this groundswell of support, set off a series of “Rallies for Religious Freedom.” Even The Washington Post, no friend of the church or the competing Washington Times, editorialized that “the case deserves attention and full Supreme Court review.” Ironically, the church emerged from True Father’s conviction on more solid ground than it had been before.

May 15, 1961

33 Couples Holy Blessing Ceremony is Held

 True Parents conducted the 33 Couple Holy Blessing in the Chungpa-Dong Church Headquarters on May 15, 1961. Together with the Three Couples whom True Parents blessed on April 16, 1960, they comprise the 36 Couple Blessing group. True Father called them the “ancestors” of all the blessed couples to come after them. He also regarded them as “the representatives of all types of people on earth” and viewed them as being needed to “pave the way to the Kingdom of Heaven and act as guides for others.” True Father explained that the 36 Couples consisted of three groups of 12, symbolizing the Old Testament, New Testament and Completed Testament ages. They also were wedded in three phases: the first at dawn, the second during the day, and the third at night. True Father recalled that the 33 Couple Blessing Ceremony was held “amid great confusion and chaos.” He noted, “The parents of the 33 Couples came swarming about the place, shouting all kinds of insults at us and creating a continuous uproar. Some went so far as to send dozens of anonymous letters to the court of justice, demanding I be sent to jail; as a result, I had to appear in court on several occasions.” According to True Father, the parents were upset that he “brought together other people’s children and married them at my own discretion, without discussing it with the parents at all.” He recalled, “We finally had to have someone stand guard at the door before we could go through with the ceremony.”

May 15, 1974

The Sun Myung Moon Christian Crusade Kicks Off

The Unification Church hoped to reap a harvest of new members as a result of True Father’s 7-City, 21-City and 32-City Day of Hope tours from 1972 to 1974. To facilitate this, the church launched a Sun Myung Moon Christian Crusade (SMCC) 10-city “Celebration of Life” tour that evangelized in each of the ten regions of the country. Beginning in the Bay Area, the itinerary included stops in Seattle; St. Paul, Minnesota; Austin, Texas; New Orleans; Miami; Columbus, Ohio; Louisville, Kentucky; Boston; and Rochester, New York. Billed as “A 21st Century Experience,” programs included an hour and fifteen minutes of entertainment—songs, solos, skits, dances and testimonials—followed by forty-five minutes of inspiration from “God’s Colonel” Bo Hi Pak, on key points of the Unification Principle. Weeklong stops in each city featured a Celebration of Life weekend workshop.

As a result of tour innovations, advance preparation and media coverage, the Celebration of Life drew substantial crowds. SMCC’s “World Premiere” on May 15 to 17, 1974, at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, drew 2,600 guests and thirty-four participants for a weekend workshop in the Santa Cruz Mountains. By Boston, the three-day total was up to 7,562. Equally important was the emergence of the New Hope Singers International and the Korean Folk Ballet. Both would make signal contributions to the culminating 8-city Day of Hope tour, scheduled to begin in September 1974 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

May 15, 1987

Citizens Federation for the Unification of the Fatherland Inaugurated

True Father inaugurated the Citizens Federation for the Unification of the Fatherland (CFUF) at the Little Angels Performing Arts Center in Seoul, Korea, on May 15, 1987. Its purpose was to facilitate the long-cherished hope and desire of the Korean people for the unification of their homeland. However, True Father viewed the re-unification of Korea in larger terms: “Korea’s problems are a smaller version of the world’s problems, and the solution of the world’s problems is essentially linked with Korea’s problems.” In particular, he saw the division of Korea as a manifestation of a global confrontation between theism and atheism. The solution to the problem was Godism and “Head-wing” thought which transcended the “ego-centered or power-oriented” thought of left- and right-wing movements.

True Father launched CFUF at a propitious time. He noted that the movement of international communism was “coming to its final phase” and that Korea was about to emerge on the world stage through the 1988 Seoul Olympics. This opened the way for the founding of the Segye Times newspaper, True Parents’ eventual meeting with North Korean President Kim Il Sung and activities promoting peaceful reunification that followed. CFUF, as a grassroots and high-level educational movement, played a significant role in these developments.

May 16, 1995

True Father Begins a 17-Nation Speaking Tour in South America

 True Father believed that the unity of North and South America was a providential necessity that would set a condition for the unification of North and South Korea. To that end, he launched CAUSA activities in Latin America during the 1980s and began investing directly in South America during the 1990s. Beginning on May 16, 1995, True Father undertook an ambitious speaking tour of 17 Latin American nations, which included audiences with eight heads of state. In these speeches and meetings he emphasized the region’s “stunning, and abundant, potential.” As he put it: “There are seemingly unlimited natural resources, and the human energies have hardly begun to be tapped. Latin America is a rich, peaceful, natural paradise of grandiose mountains and virgin lands. The mountains, rivers and jungles [hark] back to the original state of creation, the Garden of Eden.” Contemplating “the glory-filled days that await Latin America in the 21st century,” he counseled leaders to “not follow the footsteps of the developed nations,” blindly repeating “environmental errors” and falling into selfish materialism.

True Father hoped to persuade the governments of the Mercosur customs union (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile) to donate contiguous lands for development “as a model for an ideal, international and interracial nation and world.” However, when they did not step forward sufficiently, Unificationists businesses began purchasing vast tracts of land in the South American interior. The assumption was that if the leaders of North and South America, or elsewhere, could not respond to True Father’s vision of unification, they would have to be shown a working model. Thus began the South American providence to which substantial resources were dedicated in the late 1990s.

This Week in History briefly lists significant events in the history of the Unification Church, the lives of the Founders, and world events that are momentous to Unificationists. Most items are marked according to the solar calendar. Items marked “H.C.” correspond to the Cheon-gi or Heavenly Calendar, which is based on the lunar calendar. This installment covers the week of  May 10 – 16.

Contributed by Dr. Michael Mickler, professor of church history at Unification Theological Seminary.