Congratulatory Address to International Women's Federation for World Peace

I am certain that today we are witnessing a great event that will have a profound meaning in the history of women not only in Korea but throughout the world. Until now, men have provided primary leadership in leading the progress of history. This rally today, however, marks an historic turning point declaring the beginning of the "Age of Women" for the entire world.

The leadership of men has brought about a world filled with struggle and evil. Humanity continues to dream of a world of goodness, peace and happiness that will liberate us from this world of evil and struggle.

God created us as His children, and we can be assured that God has no intention of sitting by and doing nothing while the world suffers for thousands of years through wars and evil. God has been actively working to find ways to lead us to salvation. This is the meaning of the Salvation Providence carried out through religion. As a religious leader, I have consistently preached that God's Salvation Providence carried out through religion represents our final hope for the world.

Throughout history, countless leaders and heroes have dedicated their lives to building a better world, but there has never been any fundamental change in the fact that we live in a world of wars and evil. Political and economic means are insufficient for bringing such fundamental change to the world. This fact is clearly illustrated by the superpowers and developed countries of today's world. The decline of morals has become a global phenomenon, and presents a serious threat to the future of humankind.

Immorality and moral decline has reached such a point that mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, and even children, can hardly recognize each other. The very foundations of our families are being destroyed. The correlation between the increase in economic wealth and the decline in ethical conduct and sexual morality, as well as the spread of drug abuse, has brought about a critical situation.

The world is faced with the question today of how to escape from the clutches of sexual immorality, for this is the most deeply rooted of all evils. There is no possibility that politics and economics alone can save the world from the threshold of the crime and decadence that we see around us today.

Members of the Women's Federation, and representatives from around the world, I have experienced firsthand the pain and sorrow of a weak nation trampled on by a powerful neighbor. I was born 72 years ago during the Japanese colonial administration of Korea. During my youth, I thought seriously about how to bring salvation to this tragic world of war and evil. I came to the conclusion that salvation through religion has the most fundamental effect.

This is because God's Salvation Providence through religion has a strategy to use Satan's persecution for the purpose of reclaiming all the ownership that was stolen by the evil force of Satan. Religion teaches that evil brings about its own destruction by striking out at good; the path of good is one of bringing about the natural subjugation of evil by receiving evil's blows.

Ever since I was a young man in my teens, I have consistently taught the truth according to religious revelation and devoted my entire life to putting the content of this teaching into practice. You are already familiar with the manner in which my teachings, in the [next few words unclear, but my guess from what I can deduce from typography, orthography, spacing and intuition is:] form of the Unification Principle, have been spread to 160 countries around the world. The teachings are spreading particularly rapidly in former communist countries of the former Soviet Union as well as Eastern and Central Europe even in North Korea. Also, in the Islamic countries of the Middle East region, many people are coming to follow these teachings.

The Unification Church has received great persecution and suffering in a number of countries, including its home country of Korea. Today, however, the Unification Church has set its roots down firmly and permanently all over the world. No one will ever be able to uproot the Unification Church from any place in the world.

Religion forms the fundamental means by which God plans to save this world, and all the world's major religions have at their center an expectation for some kind of messianic figure. Christians believe in the second coming of Jesus. Buddhists, Confucianists and Muslims also await the reappearance of the founders of their respective religions. All these religions believe that when the messianic figure appears, he will place judgment on this world of sin and struggle and that the ideal world, that is, the Kingdom of Heaven, will be established in a short time.

Thus, all these religions teach that this world can only be saved through the second coming of the founders of their religions. This is referred to as the messianic ideal. The salvation of this world can only be accomplished by a leader who, by giving truth and True Love, is able to unite the fundamental aspects of the teachings of the major religions and perform in a unified manner the roles of the various messianic figures.

Such a leader will reveal how the original human ancestors committed the fall and brought about a history of struggle and evil. He will explain original sin, the root of all the world's evil, and shed light on the truth that will liberate humanity from evil. Because the original human ancestors Adam and Eve committed the original sin and became false parents, the returning Messiah will come as the True Parents, the original ancestors of good through whom all people will be reborn.

The True Parents will not make their advent on the clouds from the sky. Instead, they will appear in this age and on this earth as Koreans, and lead the world into an age of peace and a unified world. During my life of more than seventy years, I have received much persecution. I have never been defeated, however. My wife, President Hak Ja Han Moon, has walked this path of suffering together with me as the representative of all women in the world.

During the time that I, in the course of following the path of righteousness in accordance with God's Will, received persecution by unrighteous forces in the form of imprisonment, Mrs. Moon made the decision to gather righteous women of good conscience to begin a movement for peace. This effort has borne fruit in this rally today.

No one knows the course of religious training I went through in order to receive this content of God's truth. During that time, I came to the realization that the key to world peace and world unification lies in the unification of the Korean Peninsula, which has been divided between communism and democracy. It is for this reason that I have traveled throughout the world and devoted my entire energies to the accomplishment of this goal. This is also the reason I went to North Korea last November and negotiated directly with Kim Il-sung.

It will not be long now before we see the unification of all the world's major religions. Neither will it be long before the unification of the Korean Peninsula is accomplished. In fact, these two goals represent the reason that representatives of women from seventy countries around the world have gathered today to attend the Seoul Rally of the Women's Federation for Peace in Asia, which is being held under the presidency of Mrs. Moon. I expect eventually you will be forming a federation of families for world peace. In God's Salvation Providence, Korea is the home country of the Providence.

In each religion, we can see that the women are more devout than men, and also far outnumber the men. The Bible says that true faith on the part of a Christian means to prepare oneself as a bride who will someday receive the messiah of the second advent as her bridegroom. This biblical teaching means that all religions have been prepared by God so that they may fulfill a female role, that is, the role of the bride, in the presence of the coming messiah.

The women of this age are the true workers who, in the presence of the True Parents who come as the Messiah, will cleanse this world of war, violence, suppression, exploitation and crime led by men. Women will build an ideal world filled with peace, love and freedom. It is also up to women to see that the evil forces, primarily led by men, that opposed and persecuted the forces of righteousness and good, are now completely eradicated so that they cannot cause any more trouble.

We live in the age when the Messiah returns as the True Parents of humankind, when North and South Korea are uniting through love and truth and when all religions are to become one. This is the age in which all people of the world will rise above differences of race and ideology to join in the building of a new world of peace. I am certain that God will give His boundless blessings to all the world's women as people called for these great purposes.

I pray that God's great blessing will be upon the Women's Federation for Peace in Asia and the Women's Federation for World Peace, which is to be inaugurated today.

Thank you very much.