TOP STORY: UNIFICATION CHURCH: Moon church takes a low profile in India

c. 1996 Religion News Service MOOLAVATTOM, India (RNS)-It is a small, obscure town in India’s southern state of Kerala, in the heart of one of the nation’s largest, most conservative Christian communities. Yet Moolavattom is where the Unification Church, founded in Korea in 1954 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, has set up its southern […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

MOOLAVATTOM, India (RNS)-It is a small, obscure town in India’s southern state of Kerala, in the heart of one of the nation’s largest, most conservative Christian communities.

Yet Moolavattom is where the Unification Church, founded in Korea in 1954 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, has set up its southern India operations. The church, a visible and controversial presence in Asia and the United States, maintains a low profile here, attracting few followers and barely figuring in the region’s complex religious mileau.


But the church’s profile in India-both here and in the north-is likely to grow in coming years. In the early 1990s the church established a second operation in New Delhi, and this past November Moon gave his first public address in a hotel there.

Not only that, the church’s controversial tradition of holding group arranged weddings, involving tens of thousands of followers from various cultures, ethnic groups and races worldwide, has attracted a number of Indians yearning to emigrate to a better economic climate.

For now, few in this small southern town know about the Unification Church or its controversial theology.”I’ve never heard of the Unification Church operating in Kerala,”said the Rev. Jacob Kollaparambil, a Catholic priest based in the city of Kottayam, five miles away. His words were echoed by other clergy in and around Moolavattom.

Moon’s theology, contained in his 1976 book”Divine Principle”and other church documents, teaches that Jesus was murdered before he could fulfill his earthly mission: to marry and bring the world back to its state before the fall.

Moon’s followers consider him the messiah, and offspring from the church’s mass weddings are said to be free of humanity’s fallen nature. The church says its fundamental mission is to foster global peace through the unification of the world’s diverse population.

Such theology hardly resonates in a country like India, which is 85 percent Hindu and 10 percent Muslim, or in regions like Kerala, which has a strong Christian presence.

In Moolavattom, 50-foot towers bearing statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary soar from street corners, and Christian devotional pictures are fixed to the front of public buses.


Syrian Christians, found throughout the southern state of Kerala, are followers of St. Thomas, whom they believe brought Christianity to India around 52 A.D. Even though Hinduism remains strong in the region, there are many towns and villages where Syrian Christians form a majority.

M. Hasegawa, who is from Japan and heads the Unification Church’s operations in Kerala, said the church has tried hard not to upset the feelings of local residents.”We don’t try to convert anyone,”he said.

Still, the church is attracting Indians into its fold.

This past August, the church joined some 360,000 people worldwide in matrimony, including 75 from India. Half were from Kerala, and most had been Catholics, Hasegawa said.”Some were attracted by the international marriages and the chance to marry foreigners, but we told them we couldn’t guarantee anything,”he said.

While arranged marriages form a cornerstone of Indian culture, the country’s caste system has been a hurdle for the Unification Church. Ursula McLackland, the church’s South Asia director, said Indian women are”still very bound by their parents, who tend to be very orthodox. There is no rosy way for them to get approval for an intercaste, interreligious marriage.” Still, the Unification Church’s presence is growing in India, in part because of the high number of refugees from such places as Iraq and Afghanistan who are desperate to leave for more promising locales.

In a Unification marriage last August, Ali Reza, 32, who fled Iraq a few years ago-his sister died in jail there-wed a woman in Cairo. She remained in Egypt, and the two were linked by video. Reza said he couldn’t wait to move to Egypt, though six months after the wedding he still has not been able to get a visa and emigrate.

Abdul Quadin, 48, fled from Kabul, where he was a telecommunications manager, after his wife and children were killed by a Mujahideen rocket. In August, he was married to a woman in California.


Both Reza and Quadin said they are still good Muslims and swear by the Koran, the Islamic holy book, but they believe in the precepts of the Unification Church and its philosophy of world peace.

Elsamma Vargis, a low-caste Indian from Kerala, was blessed with a South Korean husband.”I could never have found such a good husband in India,”she said.”I can’t wait to move to his home in Seoul.”

MJP END MURPHY

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