- Holy Blessing Ceremony in the Era to Open the Gates to the Victory, Liberation and Completion of the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind -

True Father's Prayer of Blessing Ceremony
3rd day of the 3rd month by the Heavenly Calendar in the 3rd year of Cheon-gi
March 24, 2012/ Cheongshim Peace World Center, Korea

True Father’s Invocation
Father God who is the great Lord of all the cosmos, we give sincere thanks that You have per­mitted us, this day, to hold this ceremony. As Heaven has specially permitted us today to perform acts of goodness in the midst of such a wonderful environment, we beseech that You will grant Your blessing on these brides and grooms who stand here in holiness with the justification of having become children of the parents in heav­en, as representative men and representative women representing the 6.5 billion people of the world, and who now attend Heaven in this splendid environment with hearts of joy and jubilation. How You have longed to see such good men and women!
We give sincere thanks, Father, that You have allowed the grace of being able to inherit the lineage of the holy blessing, whereby we are born again in accordance with a relationship of flesh and blood with the True Parents, in 194 Abel-type countries and 193 Cain-type countries centering on the 6.5 billion peo­ple of the world.
We are truly grateful that You have permitted us to have this day to commemorate this solemn occa­sion in the presence of all nations, all creation and the entire cosmos, where True Parents, the substantial embodiment of the fruits representing the king of the kings of all nations and the numerous kings in his­tory, have become one with God, in the name of True Parents.
After the time of the Creation, our Heavenly Father, You dreamed of the model parents of all peoples and waited for the day of the blessing. Yet You could not bless Adam and Eve, and instead You lost them. Since then, You have had to endure for tens of thousands of years until this day, on which are present tens of thousands of couples who have been called here after undergoing suffering and difficulty to inherit the realm of heart under Your lineage. So Father, please welcome these brides and grooms into Your heart with open arms.
In the presence of Your heart, which had yearned for Adam and Eve to reach their twenties, have come tens of thousands of children to be blessed in this stadium in Korea, after thousands of years have passed, so please embrace them with a wide heart and deep and noble affection, and please allow the children, blessed in the spiritual world and the physical world centering on true love, to inherit the bloodline of true love through the love of God and True Parents and receive the blessing as husband and wife.
The brothers and sisters who have received the blessing in the past, and the billions of couples in the spiritual world and many blessed brothers and sisters in the physical world are all here in this stadium to congratulate the couples, so please look upon them with favor and let Your heart, which was closed, and which has yearned for this for generations, open in joy.
It was the wish of Heaven to form the one family, Adam's, but this could not be fulfilled and it was lost in Eden. This commemorative day is the joyous day on which we can go beyond that and bless these sons and daughters brought together in tens of thousands of couples, as the flowers of high, wide and deep true love, so Father we hope and pray that You will bless this day more than any day ever before.
Thanks to the joint efforts of parents, brothers and sisters, teachers in the schools of many nations, and religious leaders on the foundation of religion who have nurtured and raised these children, they have been able to be here, to be brought together as brothers and sisters, and to be dedicated before You as citi­zens of the one nation. We are truly grateful to You for permitting us this opportunity.
These new couples, the good men and women called here by Heaven and blessed together, are the new fruits representing billions of blessed couples. They are the newly harvested seeds in front of the brothers and sisters who have received the blessing before them, so please receive them as the proud brides and grooms of heaven and earth.
Heavenly Father, please look down upon this joyous arena with pleasure as the spiritual and physical worlds, the people that attend God, come together here to attend True Parents, the substantial representa­tives of the one God whom they have served from the time they were in their mothers’ wombs through the times of puberty, youth, middle age and old age. We also hope and pray in the name of True Parents that our innumerable fellow members in the kingdom of heaven, looking down at this stadium, will support these model couples who have been newly blessed with deeper, broader, loftier and more joyous hearts. Aju!

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The Unification Church held a mass wedding and holy blessing in South Korea on Saturday (March 24), with 2,000 couples from 54 countries participating.
More than 20,000 church followers gathered at a stadium in Gapyeong, 75km (47 miles) northeast of Seoul.
The founder of the church, Sun Myung Moon, and his wife were there to bless the mass ceremony. They sprinkled holy water over selected couples and declared them married.
"The mass wedding leads all mankind to be one, removing the boundaries of ethnicities, religions and nationalities. Our goal is making the world peaceful with forming new families," said Seuk Joon-ho, President of Unification Church of Korea.
Couples from South Korea and abroad hugged each other and celebrated after exchanging wedding rings.
"I am happy and I feel I should live harder in the future after having a special joint blessing ceremony altogether, not a normal wedding," said South Korean bride Lee Hang-joo.
"This whole experience has been absolutely amazing. I mean really really happy to have met Lisun (his bride) and really happy that we are together now and really look forward to years ahead and so getting to know her well," said a bridegroom Chouchane Saemie, from the United Kingdom.
Counting those who joined via Internet, a total of 5,200 couples worldwide in over 100 different nations received blessings on the same day.
The couples consisted of 1,200 newly-wed couples and 4,000 already married couples -- seeking to re-dedicate their marriages and families to God as they had married before they were converted to the church.
The church has been derided for its mass weddings as thousands of participants were matched with future spouses whom some of them had just met before the ceremony, and in many cases, did not speak the same language.
The Unification Church considers the Korean peninsula a sacred place with its website saying that Jesus Christ appeared to founder and overall leader Moon Sun-myung as he was praying in the Korean mountains and asked him "to complete the task of establishing "God's kingdom on Earth".
The founder has been a lightning rod for controversy and was once jailed in the United States for tax evasion. He also declared in 1992 that he and his wife were messiahs.
Critics have for years vilified the organization as a heretical and dangerous cult while questioning its murky finances and how it indoctrinates followers. They describe followers of the group as "Moonies", a term seen as derogatory.
번역=김수경 동아닷컴 기자 cvgrs@donga.com