Blessing ceremony of the Unification Church was first held in 1961 for 36 couples in Seoul, South Korea by Sun Myung Moon and his wife Hak Ja Han, shortly after their own marriage in 1960. All the couples were members of the Unification Church. Moon matched all of the couples except the 12 who were already married to each other from before joining the church, which was officially founded in 1954. Later Blessing ceremonies were larger in scale but followed the same pattern with all participants Unification Church members and Moon matching most of the couples. In 1982 the first large scale Blessing held outside of
United States v. Sun Myung Moon the government's prosecution of Moon were Harvey Cox, a Professor of Divinity at Harvard and Eugene McCarthy, United States Senator and former Democratic Party presidential candidate. Supporters regard the tax case as politically motivated. The prosecutors offered to drop the case in return that Moon surrendered his green card, which he chose not to do. The official website of the American Unification Church, unification.org, says: A United States Senate subcommittee, chaired by Senator Orrin Hatch, conducted its own investigation into Reverend Moon's tax case and published its findings in a report which concluded: Jeremiah S. Gutman, president of the New