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QuoteJung Eunwoo stated, "I signed the contract thinking it would be the last chance." She confessed her suspicions, saying, "They said they were building a dormitory and practice room just for us. I think it was about 100 pyeong [approx. 3,300 sq ft]. They showed us construction photos, but it seemed like they had just pulled them from Google."
Later, the actual practice room was completed, but it was a small building with a tiny practice room. Jung Eunwoo admitted, "That's when I started feeling off."
QuoteIronically Lee himself has gone into hiding, and many followers also keep refusing to answer calls from health workers to show up for checkups. ... On Sunday, the spokesman said the sect has 245,000 followers, but it later only submitted a list of 215,000, raising suspicions about its candor.
QuoteAs the cat and mouse game between Shincheonji and the government continues, Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin announced Friday he would press criminal charges against the operators of Shincheonji's Daegu church for "causing confusion" with the city's measures to contain the outbreak by refusing several times to submit the list of about 1,760 trainees living in Daegu. Kwon continued that the church also failed to submit the list of Shincheonji followers in Daegu who attend a different Shincheonji church outside the city, which amounts to about 222 people.
In an exclusive report Friday morning, the JoongAng Ilbo hinted at possible links between Shincheonji and a group of Catholics from North Gyeongsang who recently tested positive for the coronavirus after returning from a pilgrimage to Israel, saying that the son of a member of the Catholic group is a Shincheonji follower. The son and father both tested positive for the virus. The Euiseong County Office in North Gyeongsang told the paper Thursday that the son initially denied he was a Shincheonji adherent, but admitted it after county officials found him on the nationwide list of members.
QuoteIn addition, a nursing home in Cheongdo, North Gyeongsang Province saw one of its staff members confirmed to have the infection. The nurse is reportedly also a member of the Shincheonji Church, which has raised concerns among the health authorities that the home may become another infection hub as have Daenam Hospital and a facility for the disabled in Yecheon, both in North Gyeongsang Province.
QuoteUntil the confirmation of his infection, the officer had not notified the prison of the fact that he was a member of the Shincheonji Church and had participated in services of the minor Christian sect, continueing to work at the prison. Some 50 prison officers and prisoners, who had contact with the officer, have been isolated since the confirmation. This raises the likelihood that more infections could occur at the prison that houses about 400 inmates. ...
"They might have been more afraid of disclosing their membership than of the virus spreading," Busan Presbyterian University Professor Tark Ji-il said. "This shows how distorted beliefs can lead to a social problem. The members, especially those working in the public sector, should ensure that public safety is top priority."
QuoteOn Thursday, the government also requested the church to hand over a list of an additional 70,000 candidate members and their contact information. Shincheonji only "gives" membership to people who complete a seven-month-long training period. However, the church refused saying it was difficult to share the contact information of non-members....
Gyeonggi Governor Lee complained that the list obtained by the central government was incomplete, saying the number was far fewer than the one he obtained earlier, after officials entered a church facility without its consent to get a full list of members.
QuoteAccording to the transcript, the head of the Busan church said on Feb. 9, "You know about Wuhan pneumonia. Our district church is there. More than 700 people have died in China, while there are more than 30,000 confirmed cases. But not even one of our disciples has been infected. If we stand firmly by our beliefs, God will protect us." Followers respond with a resounding "Amen."
QuoteAccording to the Jeju government, 34 of the 603 Shincheonji members who responded to officials by phone Wednesday said they had shown symptoms such as fever and a cough. The officials said they have not been able to reach 43 others on the island.
Quote"Vice Health and Welfare Minister Kim Kang-lip said authorities requested the religious group submit a list of 70,000 trainees who had not been included on the previous list. "Previously, Shincheonji said that the trainees are not yet believers, so they have difficulty in providing a list," he said."Note: That's hard to believe. They keep contact information on all they encounter.
QuoteAccording to the sect's Daegu branch, 8 out of 10 followers who have underwent the virus test have been confirmed as having infections.
QuoteHe also recalled spending a lot of time in church on weekdays, joining small groups to study the Bible in crowded, confined spaces. Another former member, who left the church in 2015, told the New York Times that they were trained to sing hymns loudly and not wear anything on their faces, such as glasses or masks. They were also trained not to fear illnesses, he added.
"We were taught not to care about such worldly things like jobs, ambition or passion. Everything was focused on proselytising, even when we were sick."
QuoteThe Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency mobilized some 600 officers to locate those followers who are still unaccounted for. The group's spokesperson said they (typo? there) were about 260 who are out of touch.
QuotePolice in Daegu formed a special taskforce on Sunday to locate over 600 Shincheonji members who are believed to have come into contact with the 31st confirmed case of infection, who is considered a "supercarrier," but have gone to ground without responding to phone calls and text messages from health officials.
QuoteThe church denied reports that members were told to lie about recent services. The church said it was not an official order from the leadership but a "personal message" from one member. ...
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the woman initially refused doctors' requests that she be tested for the virus on the grounds that she had not traveled abroad recently. The church denied media reports that the woman assaulted nurses and created a commotion with fellow church members at the hospital.
Quote"This disease case is seen as the devil's deed to stop the rapid growth of Shincheonji," he wrote in the message, images of which were published by Yonhap news agency.
Quote"Her behavior is not surprising to people familiar with the church," said Chung Yun-seok, an expert on religious cults who runs the website Christian Portal News. "To them, getting sick is a sin because it prevents them from doing God's work."
QuoteMoon is known as the son of the eldest son of former President Moon Sun-myung, founder of the Unification Church, and President Han Hak-ja.
QuoteHyo Jin Moon also has five children from a previous marriage. ... He leaves a strong legacy of having dedicated his public life to inspiring people of all ages and backgrounds to live passionately for the sake of others. His vision gave rise to media projects which contribute to create a positive influence on the culture especially for young people and families.
QuoteHe was doing his cocaine ritual, and against my better judgement, I went and said I will have to talk to you. I said, I just cannot live like this. And I took his cocaine, and I tried to flush it down the toilet and that is when he started to punch me and I did get black eyes and I got bloody nose. And umm, he... But the big fear was that he was gonna kill the baby. I was seven months pregnant and I was pretty big. And he kept saying, "I am gonna kill the baby, I'm gonna kill the baby." That was the worst fear that I had, that he might punch and then something would happen.
QuoteThe church, which seeks the unification of Christian and other religions worldwide, has often drawn unfavorable attention in the U.S. for some of its practices, including mass weddings, but has enjoyed support from conservative political figures in the West. President Trump and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, among others, have spoken at federation-backed conferences. ...
The revelations linking Japanese lawmakers to the church revitalized a long legal campaign waged against the federation by a lawyers' group representing people who said their families had been coerced into donating to the church. The church responded that many donations — including half of those made by the mother of Mr. Abe's murderer — had been returned. It also said that practices such as "spiritual sales" of pricey religious trinkets had been discontinued years prior.
Nothing availed. Despite not having broken any Japanese laws, the church was dissolved after its final appeal was overturned in June. The question now is whether the federation will face a similar onslaught in Korea.
QuoteTrump, who leads polls for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, was paid a total of $2 million for speaking at two Universal Peace Federation World Summits in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Palm Beach, Florida. The group was established by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Korean evangelist and businessman who founded the Unification Church, and his wife, Hak Ja Han.
QuoteThe sentencing on Monday of Dr. Han — the federation's leader since the 2012 death of her husband — to two years in prison on bribery charges must have confounded the leadership in Pyongyang. ... One would hope that South Korean government would want to work with the Family Federation and UPF to reestablish a relationship with a hostile North Korea, given the excellent relationship UPF has with North Korea.
QuoteAmbassador DeTrani served over two decades with the CIA as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service.
QuoteSome have also objected to placing Yeomyung School on the same site as facilities intended for young children. "A hands-on learning center for young children will be established on the site along with the Early Childhood Education and Promotion Center," the resident said. "If there is a school for North Korean defectors right next to the hands-on learning center, parents would be left apprehensive. What parent would send their children there?" ...
As Friday's town hall meeting grew heated, Yeomyung School principal Cho Myung-sook fell to her knees before residents and broke into tears.
Some residents also knelt in front of Cho during the confrontation, underscoring the intensity of the dispute over the school's relocation. Cho recalled the opposition the school encountered during its attempted relocation to Eunpyeong-gu in 2019 and expressed concern that students could again be hurt by the controversy surrounding their school. "I feel so sorry and worried that our students will be hurt again," Cho said.
Quote"Minorities, in particular religious minorities, are usually attacked in three stages," said Massimo Introvigne, co-founder of CESNUR and editor of religious-freedom publication Bitter Winter. He listed intolerance in media, discrimination from administrative authorities and, finally, persecution and violence.
"That applies to totalitarian and democratic states," he warned. The petition noted that the case against Mr. Lee "unfolds in a climate where media representations of Shincheonji as a 'cult' often rely on polemical accounts by religious opponents who denounce it as heresy." ...
The Family Federation, which promotes conservative family values, has always opposed communism. That has generated powerful enemies, some of whom may be coalescing. Liberal Japanese anti-Federation activists visited Daejon, Korea, in September to join a conference with Evangelical Christian pastors and a professor from China's National Police Academy who specializes in oversight of religious movements.
Mr. Introvigne dubs the emergent trilateral grouping an "Unholy Alliance." Beijing is officially atheist and permits only state-sanctioned religious activities. State agencies root out underground churches and have suppressed a new religion, Falun Gong.
In 2019, some hardline Korean Christian clergy cooperated with Beijing to compel the deportation of worshippers of an underground Chinese religion, the Church of Almighty God, who had escaped to Korea seeking asylum. ...
Mr. Introvigne suggests that the biggest bully pulpit now exists in the United States. "In the U.S, there is more awareness of the problems taking place in a country that is a fundamental regional ally of the U.S.," he said.
QuoteReactions poured in from around the world in the hours after the ruling, which critics cast as an unprecedented legal step by the Japanese court. More important, they said, it could be the first domino to fall in an international crackdown on religious freedom.
"Unfortunately, this decision treads into territory that benefits opponents of a free society," former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement. "Having worked with Japan extensively on security and human rights matters ... I worry this precedent will harm Japan's standing as a champion of freedom in Asia and potentially advance the interests of those working against our mutual dedication to human dignity and religious freedom."
QuoteFormer U.S. President Donald Trump sent a one-minute video message to an event in Seoul organized by a group related to the Unification Church. The Universal Peace Federation opened its "Peace Summit 2023" in the South Korean capital on May 2. The event will run until May 6. ... Mike Pompeo, who was secretary of state in the Trump administration, attended the event in person and gave a speech at the podium.
QuoteFormer U.S. President Donald Trump received some $2.5 million from the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), a Unification Church affiliated group, to make video appearances on three occasions between 2021 and 2022, while former Vice President Mike Pence was paid $550,000 for speaking at a UPF event, the Mainichi Shimbun has confirmed by acquiring U.S. official records and checking them with court documents in Japan.
Meanwhile, the UPF has maintained that the group didn't pay former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who made a video appearance at its event in September 2021. If this is true, we must question why Abe agreed to speak for the event free of charge. In the video, Abe said he "highly appreciated" the Unification Church, formally called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, for its efforts to "place importance on the value of family." This video appearance is believed to have been one of the triggers for his assassination in July 2022.
QuoteAs a researcher of the Korean Peninsula, I have been advised by senior researchers to be wary of organizations affiliated with the Unification Church and academic journals published by the organization. In Washington, I encountered some Unification Church members who invited me to a symposium, offering a huge honorarium. I declined because I was aware of the back story, but many respected researchers have been signed up for such symposia by groups affiliated with the Unification Church, which have approached them under different names. This has misled the researchers into inadvertently endorsing the "legitimacy" of the Unification Church.
Quote"He (Kim Il-sung) had a remarkable re-engagement with the religion of his youth," said Mr. Cheng. "It was not an embrace — but he re-engaged." He (Sung-il Kim) built two churches in Pyongyang and invited South Korean, Korean-American and American pastors to visit. Among the pastors invited were Rev. Moon Sun-myung, founder of the Unification Church (who escaped North Korea and survived a Korean War massacre) and U.S. Evangelist Billy Graham, who unleashed two barn-storming sermons in Pyongyang.
QuoteAs Mun's (Rev. Sun-myung Moon) erstwhile daughter-in-law put it after abandoning the faith she was raised in: "The Unification Church is a classic example of what psychologists call a cult of personality."
QuoteUltimate personality cult
In the late 1950s, as North Korea rebuilt from the devastation of U.S. bombing, Kim began forging his personality cult with a vengeance. ... As the cult expanded, fellow comrades bore witness. ...
"Kim was perhaps the greatest persecutor of the Christian faith of the 20th century," Mr. Cheng continued. "He crushed it while building an alternative that was very close to Christianity."
QuoteThe Lay Members Council revealed, "Since last August, we requested the collection of evidence favorable to Chairperson Han Hak-ja, but received no written response from the religious group regarding any documents." They added, "The following measures required minimal cost, posed no disadvantage to the chairperson, and could be verified in writing: pre-collection of evidence, formation of an independent legal team, resolution of conflicts of interest, transparency in attorney fee structures, supplementation of bail and health records, preemptive review of Japan's dissolution case, and documentation of legal briefings. However, no response was received."
QuoteA special counsel team on Friday appealed Unification Church leader Han Hak-ja's two-year prison sentence for bribing the wife of former President Yoon Suk Yeol and other corruption charges. Special counsel Min Joong-ki's team, which had sought a 13-year prison term for the 83-year-old, said it submitted the appeal, arguing the sentence did not match the gravity of her crimes.
QuoteHan's legal representatives submitted the appeal Friday, days after a Seoul court convicted the 83-year-old on charges of violating the anti-graft law, the political funds law, and embezzlement.
QuoteFormer aides to Chun Jae-soo, the mayor of Busan, have been found guilty of destroying evidence ahead of a raid related to allegations of receiving money and valuables from the Unification Church during his time as a member of the National Assembly. ...
"A" allegedly dismantled the computer's hard drive with a screwdriver, smashed it with a hammer, bent the SSD (semiconductor memory chip storage device) with his hands and feet, and discarded the pieces in a nearby field and a trash bin at a Busan bathhouse.
The defendants argued that the statute of limitations for the alleged bribery had expired, making the evidence destruction charge invalid. However, Judge Kim stated, "If investigations reveal that Chun Jae-soo received bribes exceeding 30 million Korean won, the statute of limitations would extend to over 10 years, meaning the statute of limitations for Chun's criminal case would not have expired at the time of the defendants' actions. Therefore, it cannot be conclusively stated that criminal prosecution against Chun was impossible."
QuoteA legal professional remarked, "How can aides who destroyed evidence to cover something up be indicted, while the politician accused of crimes is cleared?"
QuoteThe sentencing on Monday of Dr. Han — the federation's leader since the 2012 death of her husband — to two years in prison on bribery charges must have confounded the leadership in Pyongyang. ... One would hope that South Korean government would want to work with the Family Federation and UPF to reestablish a relationship with a hostile North Korea, given the excellent relationship UPF has with North Korea.
QuoteAmbassador DeTrani served over two decades with the CIA as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service.
