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
Unification movement News". Until 2010, it owned the "Washington Times". On November 2, 2010, Sun Myung Moon and a group of former "Times" editors purchased the paper from News World. Master Marine, a shipbuilding and fishing company in Alabama; International Seafood of Kodiak, Alaska; and True World Foods, which runs a major portion of the sushi trade in the USA. In 2011 Master Marine opened a factory in Las Vegas, Nevada to manufacture a 27-foot pleasure boat designed by Moon. In the 1970s the Unification Church of the United States began making major real estate investments. Church buildings were purchased around the