All this while being the world's biggest egomaniac and narcissist.
So I have to rack Moon, I guess. Paging Pastor Bob Tilton...
The Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who turned his Unification Church into a worldwide religious movement and befriended North Korean leaders as well as U.S. presidents, has died, church officials said. He was 92.
Moon died today at a church-owned hospital near his home in Gapyeong, northeast of Seoul, two weeks after being hospitalized with pneumonia, Unification Church spokesman Ahn Ho-yeul said. Moon's wife and children were at his side, Ahn said.
The church will hold a 13-day mourning period and start accepting mourners Thursday at a multipurpose gym at its nearby religious center, the church said in a statement. The funeral will be held Sept. 15, and Moon will be buried at nearby Cheonseung Mountain, where his home is located.
Moon, born in 1920 in a town that is now in North Korea, founded his religious movement in Seoul in 1954 after surviving the Korean War. He preached new interpretations of lessons from the Bible.
The church gained fame in the 1970s and 1980s for holding mass weddings of thousands of followers, often from different countries, whom Moon matched up in a bid to build a multicultural religious world.
The church was accused of using devious recruitment tactics and duping followers out of money; parents of followers in the U.S. and elsewhere expressed worries that their children were brainwashed into joining. The church responded by saying that many other new religious movements faced similar accusations in their early stages.
The church's holdings include the Washington Times newspaper; the New Yorker Hotel and a seafood distribution firm that supplies sushi to Japanese restaurants across the U.S. It gave the University of Bridgeport $110 million over more than a decade to keep the Connecticut school operating.
It also acquired a ski resort, a professional soccer team and other businesses in South Korea. It also operates a foreign-owned luxury hotel in North Korea.
The Unification Church claims millions of members worldwide, but church defectors and other critics say the figure is no more than 100,000.
In 2009, the Unification Church said Moon married 45,000 people in simultaneous ceremonies worldwide in his first large-scale mass wedding in years. Some were newlyweds and others reaffirmed vows. He married an additional 7,000 couples in South Korea in February 2010. The ceremonies attracted news media coverage but little of the controversy that dogged the church in earlier decades.
Moon said he was 16 when Jesus called upon him to complete his work. While preaching the gospel in North Korea in the years after the country was divided into the communist-backed North and U.S.-allied South, Moon was imprisoned there in the late 1940s for allegedly spying for South Korea -- a charge Moon disputed.