The head of the Church of Unification, also called Sect Moon, was arrested this Tuesday, September 23, under a mandate issued by the Seoul Court in South Korea. Han Hak-Ja, 82, is accused of corruption, more specifically having poured bribes to former first lady Kim Keon Hee and an influential deputy.
Han Hak-J has been at the head of the controversial Luna Secta since 2012, when her husband, Moon Sun-Myung, died. It was he who founded the Church of Unification, of his official name, in 1954.
Born in North Korea, this man of a rural family claims to have had at the age of 15 a vision of Jesus Christ asking him to continue his mission so that humanity is “pure” and “without sin.” Considering himself a Messiah, founded his own religious movement almost twenty years later, derived from Christianity, in Seoul.
Millions of followers
Today, this Church, which has become famous in the 1970s and 1980s for its mass marriages often organized in stadiums, claims ten million followers worldwide. It would be established in more than 200 countries, especially in Japan, which serves as a financial bastion.
His sectarian culture is controversial: she is regularly accused of extracting money from her followers. The faithful statement of having been forced to give up their property by integrating the movement or even buying objects to gain their salvation, underlining our colleagues from the Cross.
In an attempt to make people forget criticism, the renown of the Unification Church in 2015, the “Family Federation for Peace and World Unit” (FFPUM).
In addition to its religious influence, the lunar sect is based on an economic empire, from media to hotels, including food distribution. Moon Sun-Myung has become a billionaire.
Political ties, from Japan to France
Adopting an anti -comunist line during the Cold War, its great influence also penetrated the political world. The lunar sect was seen to a good eye by the South Korean military regime in power until 1979. It also attracted the sympathy of the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, to the White House from 1969 to 1974. The French political field also penetrated in the 80s through the national main door, the old national rally.
The representative in France of the Unification Church, Pierre Ceyrac, was elected deputy for the north in 1986 under the FN Banner. According to the point, a pact between Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Moon sect would have been completed to help the patriarch to be recognized internationally and prepare the way to the Elysée.
“We know that the organization paid the FN between 20 and 30 million francs (from 3.5 to 4.5 million euros) until 1986,” in 2012 it analyzed the historian Nicolas Lebourg, a specialist in the extreme right, in the columns of the instructs.
However, this idyll was brief housing. The lunar sect was “scared” by the words of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the qualified gas chambers as “World War II detail point” during an interview in RTL in 1987, says Pierre Ceyrac to the point.
Still very present in Japan
In Japan, however, the boundaries between the lunar sect and the political world are always porous. According to a survey conducted in 2022 by the Asahi newspaper and seen by Le Monde, in Japan, 150 parliamentarians, seven governors of 47 and 290 general tips elected (more than 10 % of the total) admitted links to the sect. Eighty percent are members of the Democratic Liberal Party, in power almost without discontinuity since its creation in 1955.
The nearby ties between the PLD and the Moon cost the former Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, killed on July 8, 2022. His alleged murderer, Tetsuya Yamagami, currently in prior detention to the trial and could be sentenced to the penalty of death if they declared him guilty, they wanted to ruin their mother.
After an investigation into the murder of former chief executive, a Japanese court ordered last March, the legal dissolution of the branch of the sect in the archipelago. The religious organization appealed this decision, which would deprive it of its tax exemptions but that would not prevent its activities from continuing.
Source: BFM TV
