ASAN, South Korea (AP) - Brides in white wedding gowns and Japanese kimonos joined grooms in black suits and red ties Wednesday for the Unification Church's biggest mass wedding in a decade - a spectacle church officials say involved some 40,000 people around the world.
The "blessing ceremony" was the church's largest since 1999, and may well be the last on such a grand scale officiated by the 89-year-old Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the controversial founder of the Unification Church.
Nearly a half-century after arranging the marriages of 24 couples in his first mass wedding, Moon blessed more than 10,000 couples gathered at Sun Moon University, the school he founded in Asan, south of Seoul.
About half are marrying for the first time, some in marriages arranged by Moon himself; the rest are renewing their wedding vows. Officials said Moon also blessed 10,000 couples from Sweden to Brazil taking part in simultaneous ceremonies around the world.
The mass wedding comes as Moon is moving to hand day-to-day leadership over to his children. The Rev. Moon Hyung-jin, the 30-year-old son tapped to take over religious affairs, insists his father remains in charge of the church and in good health.
The massive global ceremony is meant to mark two key anniversaries in the leader's life: his 90th birthday and his 50th wedding anniversary, church official said.
Row after row of brides in veils and grooms in white gloves - hailing from South Korea, the U.S., Japan and Europe - joined married couples renewing their vows. Earlier, they posed for photos, sang and practiced shouting "Hurrah!" as the wedding rehearsal got under way.
"I'm a little bit nervous," Rie Furuta, 25, admitted before the ceremony. She had her groom, Tadakuni Sano, both 25-year-olds from Japan, have met only three times since their marriage was arranged in March.
Dressed in an austere black suit, Moon sprinkled holy water toward the couples, who then exchanged rings. After blessing them, he led the crowd of 20,000 in a loud cheer. White confetti floated into the air.
"It's the realization of a dream I've had for so long. Taking part in a mass wedding only adds to the profoundness - I barely have the words to describe what I feel," Laudicea Corina de Padua, 40, said in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Dressed in a shimmering white gown, she was among some 2,000 people in 40 Brazilian cities who took part in the ceremony via simultaneous broadcast. Her mate, Manoel Marcelino dos Santos, a 38-year-old metalworker, was chosen for her by national church leaders.
"Marrying in this way, with so many other people around the world, will give more strength to our union, it feels like they are all a part of us," he said.
Critics who accuse the church of engaging in cultlike practices say the mass weddings prove it brainwashes its followers. Many let Moon pick their spouses on the belief that he has divine insight, meeting their future spouses for the first time at the mass weddings.
Moon, a self-proclaimed Messiah who says he was 15 when Jesus Christ called upon him to carry out his unfinished work, has courted controversy and criticism since founding the Unification Church in Seoul in 1954.
He held his first mass wedding in the early 1960s, arranging the marriages of 24 couples himself and renewing the vows of 12 married couples.
Over the next two decades, the weddings grew in scale and began to involve followers from around the world. A 1982 mass wedding at Madison Square Garden in New York, the first held outside South Korea, drew tens of thousands of participants - and protesters. The ceremonies had been smaller in recent years.
"My wish is to completely tear down barriers and to create a world in which everyone becomes one," Moon said in his recent autobiography.
In New York, 22-year-old Krystof Heller said his parents married in the 1982 mass wedding. He celebrated his marriage Wednesday to Maria Lee, 23, of South Korea. They've known each other for about four months.
"It's something you grow up with. It something you anticipate through your whole life," he said.
"It's not just about a mass wedding, there is the moral emphasis. The big crowd is just the perk.
In Washington D.C., children played in the back as churchgoers watched the ceremony on a large screen flanked by the flags of South Korea, Japan and the United States.
"This is the best way to make peace," said Fumi Oliver, a native of Japan who married an American, the Rev. Zagery Oliver, 12 years ago. "International, intercultural, interracial marriage is the best way to make peace."
Ceremonies also took place in an Oslo, Norway, apartment; a Stockholm, Sweden suburb; and in Japan, Venezuela and across the United States.
The ceremony in Honduras marks a new start for the movement in the Latin American nation, said Omar Valle, president of the Unification Church in Tegucigalpa. He said 25 couples will renew their vows.
"Through this ceremony, we join a large global family, all as brothers," he said.