|
Post by Watchman on Feb 20, 2006 14:42:18 GMT -5
COOK ISLANDS: Local Church Leaders Unite Against Rev. Moon's Church
Members of the Religious Advisory Council have unanimously agreed to oppose any attempts to register the Moonies' Unification Church in the Cook Islands.
The term “Moonies’ refers to members of Reverend Sun Myung Moon's controversial Unification Movement. Members prefer the term Unificationist but the American media coined the word in 1974 during their “Madison Square Garden” campaign.
According to Moon’s doctrines, Jesus Christ failed in his mission and must be supplanted by a second, Korean-born messiah.
Council president Pastor Tutai Pere said the council been told that scouts representing the Moonies have been inquiring about properties on Rarotonga that they can buy.
“We have not seen anything concrete to prove that these people want to buy homes here, but we are taking a proactive step in our decision to oppose any moves to register the church,” he said.
“We, however, have proof that they (Moonies) are anti-Christ and anti-God. We are saying no to the movement. It is better to be proactive than to be reactive when they arrive here especially when we cannot stop anyone from visiting this place. So we would rather oppose the registration of the movement.”
Moon was quoted in one of his lectures saying, “I am the incarnation of God, the whole world is in my hands and will conquer and subjugate the world. God is now throwing Christianity away and is now establishing a new religion, and this new religion is the Unification Church. All Christians in the world are destined to be absorbed by our movement.”
Moon is no stranger to the Cook Islands. Some members of parliament and community leaders have been on free trips to Korea on several occasions to attend one Moon's many conferences.
Last year Piho Rua led a group of MPs including Tiaki Wuatai, Kete Ioane and Teariki Heather to attend the annual inter-religious and international federation for world peace (IIFWP) in Korea.
Other MPs including Ngamau Munokoa, Tangata Vavia and Mii Parima and former MPs Robert Wigmore, Sir Pupuke Robati, Teanua Kamana and Rei Jack, also benefited from an all-expenses paid trip to Korea.
Deputy Prime Minister, Dr Terepai Maoate attended the meeting in Korea last year and told Cook Islands News that he agreed to attend because he was told it focused on religion and good governance.
“I felt that this interested me because I am a strong believer in religion as a guide for leaders throughout the country,” Maoate said last year. The Cook Islands attended the conference with only two other Pacific Islands states, Vanuatu and Palau......CINEWS/PNS
|
|
|
Post by Watchman on Apr 21, 2006 14:57:01 GMT -5
Despite Controversy, Moon and His Church Moving into Mainstream
CHICAGO _ Two decades after serving time in federal prison, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon had so effectively worked his way back into the political establishment that some congressmen attended his "coronation" on Capitol Hill.
In an unusual ceremony held in March 2004 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., donned white gloves and placed a gleaming crown atop Moon's head. Moon informed the group that Hitler and Stalin had, from beyond the grave, proclaimed him "humanity's savior, messiah, returning lord and true parent."
Davis, who has since distanced himself from the Unification Church, said he thought the ceremony was an attempt to "bridge gaps" between different religions, and didn't learn until later that Moon interpreted the crowning as a symbol of his religious and political ascendance. "Did I think he was being incarnated into anything?'' said Davis, a deacon in his Baptist church in Chicago. "No. I think it's ludicrous."
Inside the church, though, followers saw the coronation as evidence that world leaders were recognizing Moon as a messiah. "Members of the U.S. Congress gathered to crown me as the king of world peace," he said in a sermon in May of that year. "How can this possibly be a human work?"
The ceremony was another example of Moon's evolution into the American mainstream, including having former President George H.W. Bush speak at the 1996 launch of a Moon-affiliated newspaper in Argentina, news accounts show. In 2005, another Moon-affiliated company donated $250,000 to President George W. Bush's inaugural committee.
While some religious scholars say Unification Church membership in the United States has stagnated at 5,000, church officials contend it's stronger than ever, with 12,000 in the United States and several million members worldwide.
Derided as a cult in the 1970s and '80s that aggressively recruited young people to sell flowers in airports, the church changed its emphasis a decade ago to forming alliances with other faiths around issues such as abstinence and resistance to gay marriage.
Born in 1920 in what is now North Korea, Moon was raised as a Presbyterian, according to his official biography. When he was 16, he says, Jesus came to him in a vision and asked Moon to complete what he considered Christ's unfinished task: In failing to marry and have children, Jesus offered only partial salvation to the world-stances considered heresy by mainstream Christians. The church's most spectacular rite remains mass weddings, which the church calls the way "fallen men and women can be engrafted into the true lineage of God."
In 1954, Moon registered his Unification Church under the official name, The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. As his movement has matured, his church's members have moved away from communal living to more conventional family arrangements, and public criticism has quieted.
"It's been here for a generation," J. Gordon Melton, director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in California. "The concerns about it have just sort of drifted away."
___
(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
|
|
|
Post by Watchman on Jun 12, 2006 20:16:40 GMT -5
By RICK CASEY Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
IT was a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets.
The phone rang on my desk, waking me from a reverie I don't remember.
"Casey," I said, hoping to sound like a private eye.
The guy on the other end really was a private eye. Not Garrison Keillor's "Guy Noir," but a Virginia electronic gumshoe named Larry Zilliox.
Maybe you have a hobby. Zilliox's is keeping tabs on the sprawling empire of the world's wealthiest self-described Messiah, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
In the course of his probing, Zilliox came across an odd entry in the most recent tax filing of the Washington Times Foundation, which is associated with the conservative newspaper founded in 1982 by Moon.
The document was dated mid-2004 and included a list of organizations to which grants had been made.
A million bucks to Houston? Three received grants totaling $9,000.
The New York headquarters of Moon's Unification Church received $11,200.
Another of Moon's organizations, the American Family Coalition Inc., received a grant of $254,500.
Then came the grabber: a whopping $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation.
Why would Moon's Washington Times Foundation give a million bucks to Houston?
Zilliox said he figured I'd have a better chance of finding out than he would.
Maybe he was right.
I decided to take the direct approach.
I called the Washington Times Foundation, but the number listed on its tax form was no longer working.
The Bush connection I called the Washington Times and asked for the foundation. I reached the voice mail of a separate foundation, but my call was not returned.
I located two of the officers of the foundation at the Washington Times and another at UPI (also owned by the Moon organization), but my phone calls and e-mails went unanswered.
So I called Steve Maislin, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Community Foundation.
He wasn't in, but I left a message asking why the Washington Times Foundation would give $1 million to his foundation. He called and left a message in return.
He couldn't legally tell me, he said.
Later I reached Maislin and asked him if he could point me to the law that bound his lips. He said he misspoke.
"I meant that under the law it's not a public record," he said. "We're not required to disclose donations in or grants out in our tax returns. We don't as a matter of policy."
Actually, they do report the grants they give, as we will see below.
He said some people who give money want it kept private so they won't be badgered by fundraisers.
Zilliox had a theory. He figured Moon gave the money to the Houston foundation as a pass-through to the presidential library of the elder President Bush.
It wouldn't be the first connection between Moon and Bush. In 1995 Bush was handsomely paid to make six speeches to Moon-related groups in Japan.
The next year he would go to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to celebrate the opening of a new Moonie newspaper there.
Zilliox's notion turned out not to be an idle theory. The long list of grant recipients listed in the community foundation's tax return that year included the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation at Texas A&M.
The amount: $2,132,471.
So I called Rod Thornton at the Bush library foundation.
He hesitated for a moment, then explained that the donation from the Greater Houston Community Foundation came from proceeds from Bush's 80th birthday celebration in 2004, which included a huge party at Minute Maid Park and a fundraising extravaganza to benefit three of the former president's favorite causes: his library, the Points of Light Foundation he founded, and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
M.D. Anderson received $4.4 million from the Greater Houston Community Foundation that year, and the Points of Light Foundation received $1.8 million.
One call remained, to Jim McGrath, a former speechwriter for the former president who still serves as a family spokesman.
He explained that the money raised through Bush's birthday bash was funneled through the Greater Houston Community Foundation because of its tax-exempt status.
And did $1 million come from the Washington Times Foundation?
"We're in an uncomfortable position," he said. "If a donor doesn't want to be identified we need to honor their privacy."
I asked him about another part of Zilliox's theory: that the donation was made to help persuade Bush's son, the current president, to grant Moon a pardon for a 1982 felony tax evasion conviction that had put him in prison for 13 months.
Moon had applied for a pardon from the elder president Bush, but withdrew the request.
"If that's why he gave the grant, he's throwing his money away," said McGrath. "That's not the way the Bushes operate."
He added, "President Bush has been very grateful for the friendship shown to him by the Washington Times Foundation, and the Washington Times serves a vital role in Washington. But there can't be any connection to any kind of a pardon."
|
|