Court in Japan orders the dissolution of the Unification Church

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Court in Japan orders the dissolution of the Unification Church

2025-03-25 22:07 Last Updated At：22:10

TOKYO (AP) — The Unification Church in Japan was ordered dissolved by a court Tuesday after a government request spurred by the investigation into the 2022 assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The South Korea-based church said it was considering an immediate appeal of the Tokyo District Court’s revocation of its legal status, which would take away its tax-exempt privilege and require liquidation of its assets.

The order followed a request by Japan’s Education Ministry in 2023 to dissolve the influential South Korea-based sect, citing manipulative fundraising and recruitment tactics that sowed fear among followers and harmed their families.

In the ruling, the court said the church’s problems were extensive and continuous, and a dissolution order is necessary because it is not likely it could voluntarily reform, according to NHK television.

“We believe our claims were accepted,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters, adding the government will continue efforts to support victims of the church.

The Japanese branch of the church had criticized the request as a serious threat to religious freedom and the human rights of its followers.

The church called the court order regrettable and unjust and said in a statement the court's decision was based on “a wrong legal interpretation and absolutely unacceptable."

Tomihiro Tanaka, president of the church's Japanese branch, accused the government of “fabricating damages." The church is “not a malicious group that should be dissoloved,” he told a news conference on Tuesday.

The investigation into Abe's assassination revealed links over decades between the church and Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party. The church obtained legal status as a religious organization in Japan in the 1960s during an anti-communist movement supported by Abe’s grandfather, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi.

The man accused of killing Abe resented the church and blamed it for his family's financial troubles.

The church, which officially calls itself the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, is the first religious group subject to a revocation order based on violations of Japan’s civil code. Two earlier case involved criminal charges — the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which carried out a sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, and Myokakuji group, whose executives were convicted of fraud.

To seek the church's dissolution, the Education Ministry had submitted 5,000 documents and pieces of evidence to the court, based on interviews with more than 170 people.

The church tried to steer its followers’ decision-making, using manipulative tactics, making them buy expensive goods and donate beyond their financial ability and causing fear and harm to them and their families, seriously deviating from the law on religious groups, officials and experts say.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs said the settlements reached in or outside court exceeded 20 billion yen ($132 million) and involved more than 1,500 people.

Lawyers representing those seeking damages from the church welcomed the court decision as a major first step toward redress.

“We must pursue our effort to achieve redress and to prevent future problems,” head lawyer Susumu Murakoshi told reporters, demanding the church accept the dissolution order and offer an apology and compensation to all victims.

The church was founded in Seoul in 1954 by the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who preached new interpretations of the Bible and conservative, family-oriented value systems.

Nicknamed the “Moonies,” after its founder, the church developed relations with conservative world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump, as well as his predecessors Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The church faced accusations in the 1970s and 1980s of using devious recruitment tactics and brainwashing adherents into turning over huge portions of their salaries to Moon. In Japan, the group has faced lawsuits for offering “spiritual merchandise” that allegedly caused members to buy expensive art and jewelry or sell their real estate to raise donations for the church.

The church has acknowledged excessive donations but says the problem has lessened since the group stepped up compliance in 2009.

Experts say Japanese followers are asked to pay for sins committed by their ancestors during Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula, and that the majority of the church’s worldwide funding comes from Japan.

Vatican could be a venue for Russia-Ukraine talks, Rubio says, after pope renews an offer to help

2025-05-17 22:29 Last Updated At：22:30

ROME (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Saturday that the Vatican could be a venue for Russia-Ukraine peace talks, taking up the Holy See’s longstanding offer after Pope Leo XIV vowed to personally make “every effort” to help end the war.

Speaking to reporters in Rome before meeting with Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, the Vatican point man on Ukraine, Rubio said that he would be discussing potential ways the Vatican could help, “the status of the talks, the updates after yesterday (Friday) and the path forward.”

Asked if the Vatican could be a peace broker, Rubio replied: “I wouldn’t call it broker, but it’s certainly — I think it’s a place that both sides would be comfortable going.”

“So we’ll talk about all of that and obviously always grateful to the Vatican for their willingness to play this constructive and positive role,” he said at the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

The Vatican has a tradition of diplomatic neutrality and had long offered its services to try to help facilitate talks, but found itself sidelined during the all-out war, which began on Feb. 24, 2022.

Pope Francis, who often angered both sides with his comments, had entrusted Zuppi with a mandate to try to find paths of peace. But the mandate seemed to narrow to help facilitate the return of Ukrainian children taken by Russia, and the Holy See also was able to mediate some prisoner exchanges.

Leo, who was elected history’s first American pope on May 8, took up Francis’ call for peace in Ukraine in his first Sunday noon blessing as pope. He appealed for all sides to do whatever possible to reach “an authentic, just and lasting peace.”

Leo, who as a bishop in Peru had called Russia's war an “imperialist invasion," vowed this week personally to “make every effort so that this peace may prevail.”

In a speech to eastern rite Catholics, including the Greek Catholic Church of Ukraine, Leo begged warring sides to meet and negotiate.

“The Holy See is always ready to help bring enemies together, face to face, to talk to one another, so that peoples everywhere may once more find hope and recover the dignity they deserve, the dignity of peace,” he said.

The Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, repeated the Vatican’s offer to serve as a venue for direct talks, saying the failure of negotiations in Istanbul to reach a ceasefire this week was “tragic.”

“We had hoped it could start a process, slow but positive, toward a peaceful solution to the conflict,” Parolin said on the sidelines of a conference. “But instead we’re back to the beginning.”

Asked concretely what such an offer would entail, Parolin said that the Vatican could serve as a venue for a direct meeting between the two sides.

“One would aim to arrive at this, that at least they talk. We’ll see what happens. It’s an offer of a place,” he said.

“We have always said, repeated to the two sides that we are available to you, with all the discretion needed,” Parolin said.

The Vatican scored what was perhaps its greatest diplomatic achievement of the Francis pontificate when it facilitated the talks between the United States and Cuba in 2014 that resulted in the resumption of diplomatic relations.

The Holy See has also often hosted far less secret diplomatic initiatives, such as when it brought together the rival leaders of South Sudan in 2019. The encounter was made famous by the image of Francis bending down to kiss their feet to beg them to make peace.

Perhaps the Holy See's most critical diplomatic initiative came during the peak of the Cuban missile crisis when, in the fall of 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered a secret deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba that were soon detected by U.S. spy planes.

As the Kennedy administration considered its response, with the threat of nuclear war looming, Pope John XXIII pleaded for peace in a public radio address, in a speech to Vatican ambassadors and also wrote privately to Kennedy and Khruschev, appealing to their love of their people to stand down.

Many historians have credited John XXIII’s appeals with helping both sides step back from the brink of nuclear war.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.