4000 Marry in South Korean Mass Wedding

About 4,000 couples from more than fifty countries attended the event at the Cheongshim World Peace Centre in Gapyeong, about 37 miles northeast of Seoul, today- Tuesday.
The mass weddings have been a signature of the church since the early 1960s. Around 800 of the couples were 'matched' four days before Tuesday’s wedding, at an 'engagement ceremony' presided over by Hak Ja Han, the widow of the church’s founder, Sun Myung Moon, who died in 2012.
Mass weddings, often held in sports stadiums with tens of thousands of couples, have long been a signature feature of the church, founded by Moon in 1954.
The church’s mass weddings began in the early 1960s. At first, they involved just a few dozen couples but the numbers mushroomed over the years.
In 1997, 30,000 couples tied the knot in Washington, and two years later around 21,000 filled the Olympic Stadium in Seoul.
Many were personally matched by Moon, who taught that romantic love led to sexual promiscuity, mismatched couples and dysfunctional societies. Moon’s preference for cross-cultural marriages also meant that couples often shared no common language.
The majority of couples participating on Tuesday had married before joining the church, and had chosen to renew their vows as full members.
Around 800 new couples married on Tuesday had chosen to be matched four days earlier at an engagement ceremony presided over by Moon’s widow, though in recent years matchmaking responsibilities have largely shifted towards parents.
Michael Schroder, a 20-year-old from London, said he had been “extremely nervous” before being paired off with his new Japanese wife, Atsumi Sato, 21. “But now I’m just very happy and very excited,” Schroder said. Sato said she had been unable to sleep all night, “so I’m really tired, but happy as well”.