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ONE HUNDRED MILES FROM MANHATTAN
By Guillermo Fesser BARCELONA BOOKS
Copyright © 2014 Kristin Keenan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8993-6
CHAPTER 1
August
John Raucci, the driver who picks us up from JFK Airport, was born in 1950 in Brooklyn, into an Italian and thoroughly Catholic family. That's why he throws me for a loop when he mentions that he was a member of Reverend Moon's Unification Church. He shatters my preconceptions and gives me a cultural shock that is not unusual for Europeans who travel to the United States with a pre-conceived notion of Americans. You expect to run into Woody Allen or Beyoncé or a tie-wearing pair of Mormons who distribute little flyers in people's mailboxes. You expect the stereotypes that the mass media feeds us. No way. The cultural combinations are so unpredictable that the blonde, blue-eyed driver taking us to our destination in the Hudson River Valley followed precepts dictated from far-away North Korea.
Raucci arrives at the wheel of a Lincoln Continental, with a trunk as big as my parents' cellar. Maybe this American tendency to enlarge objects stems from the need to keep things proportional to a natural environment into which it seems the Creator injected steroids. Here, the rivers are almost as wide as they are long and domestic cats appear to be blown up like balloons by gas station air pumps. Everything is big. Thicker is better, like the ad for Long John Silver claims. Despite the spacious trunk, we play three rounds of Tetris with the bags to fit them all in. Take one out. Put another in. Not that one. Take it back out and try putting the first one in the other way around. Even so, some of the bags don't fit and we have no choice but to intersperse them between us in the car. We're all squashed together, like sardines in a can, full of expectation before the new adventure that awaits us. Raucci exchanges a few pleasantries with us, and then starts talking. We are suffering from jet lag and travel exhaustion, so we can barely open our mouths. I simply listen. On a two-hour drive, if you can ignore three children kicking the back of your seat, you can learn a lot from your interlocutor.
Actually, my conversation with Raucci begins when one of my children, despite loud protests from the other two, decides to remove his shoes. Oh, what a stench! However, our driver smiles and launches into a story about the benefits of walking barefoot, which leads him to rewind to his memories of being a long-distance runner at school. Raucci was good at sports, and quickly understood that he would find no better springboard to college than excelling at one of them.
That was during baseball's glory days, when stadiums were packed to the brim. This sport, which rarely has an exciting play, created infinite betting possibilities and gave working class the chance to return home with a wad of cash. Raucci was well-suited for pitching, but opted instead for the subtler glory of shaving a few seconds off the clock on the 1,500-meter track. "Baseball forces you to be closed up in a stadium," he confesses as we finally break free of the monumental traffic jam around the airport. "Running lets you go out into the world. The landscape is not pre-determined for the runner; he picks his course in each training session and can change it at will." Maybe because of this, during his long outdoor training sessions, Raucci was often overcome by a sensation of having found his rightful place in the universe and being in harmony with the cosmos. He ran against the elements and against himself. He got good grades and never suffered any injury that forced him to give up running, the rhythm of which perfectly suited his easy-going personality and developed the spirituality that had accompanied him since early childhood. Running and the serenity displayed by his Catholic teachers at school led him to follow the call to religion at age 15 in Leonardtown, Maryland. There, he completed the juniorate and then the novitiate course at theseminary of Theodore James Ryken, founder of the Xaverian order.
When Raucci came of age, he donned the robes of a Franciscan brother and became Little John—in the midst of a social revolution that questioned the established order. The intellectual Little John found that he demanded more freedom of worship than the Xaverian Brothers Minor could offer him. In the priesthood, Raucci had to strike a difficult balance between what psychology told him and what the spiritual path had opened for him, and found himself profoundly confused. Finally, the need to follow his own instincts overpowered his devotion to the emotion-stifling practice that religion had become for him. Heartbroken, he felt compelled to hang up his beloved black robe in less than a year after joining the brothers.
Raucci enrolled in the psychology department at Saint Francis College, "the small college of big dreams five minutes from Manhattan" in Brooklyn Heights. Once he had a degree under his belt, he left Brooklyn to travel through Europe. His aim was to practice French, the language that had so fascinated him in the classroom. He could do so to his heart's content in Paris. He also traveled through Switzerland. When he finally reached the state of grace that speaking a foreign language with ease affords, his money ran out and he had no choice but to say a tout a l'heure to the Old Continent and return home.
Back in New York, where Raucci muddled through the time fog that envelops those who ponder their future, a follower of the Unification Church approached him to talk about peace. At the time, Raucci did not know how to believe in God, and said as much. His new friend treated him with sympathy and also spoke enviably fluent French, so Raucci accepted his company as a means to improve his own use of the subjunctive, que je lise, que nous lisions, and memorize a few tongue twisters: un soupir souvient souvent d'un souvenir. ("A sigh often originates from a memory.") Raucci also learned that the new faith was based on the belief that Jesus Christ had appeared on Mount Mydou in North Korea before a young boy named Sun Myung Moon. Jesus had enjoined Moon to complete the evangelizing mission that had been interrupted by his crucifixion. According to Raucci's new friend, it was not God's predestined will that Jesus be crucified. All that stuff about Pontius Pilate washing his hands had caught the Creator off guard. That's why God's plan for the kingdom of peace went awry and complete salvation was delayed until the Second Coming. The day the apparition took place, early on Easter Sunday, April 17, 1935, the chosen one was 15 years old (or 16, according to the Korean way of counting) and the divine command threw him into a long period of doubt. According to Sun Myung Moon's own testimony, he clung to the hem of Jesus' clothing and wept inconsolably. "Oh, God, why would you give me a mission of such paramount importance?" He stayed like that for days, buried beneath a mountain of fears. He was able to overcome his anguish through prayer. After making a pilgrimage throughout North Korea 18 years later, Sun Myung Moon proclaimed to the world that he had accepted the divine challenge to save his people and bring God's peace to the Earth! He then set off for Japan and the United States so he could tell the world about the greatness of the Korean people. Sun Myung Moon had resumed the testimony of the King of Kings and proclaimed himself the new envoy of heaven.
Moon's followers told Raucci that the aim of the Unification Church was to reunite under a single leadership the various Christian trends. Their secret formula consisted of injecting into Christianity the spirituality inherent in Far Eastern religions—an explosive mix of two opposites—to create a new order with the best each house had to offer. That is apparently why the Son of God had opted to go to Mount Mydou in search of an heir. For Raucci, the idea of attempting to unify religions was a seductive proposal and, whether due to the incentive of being able to express himself with someone in the language of Alex de Tocqueville, or because the story of Moon revived the admiration he had felt for Jesus during his year as a Franciscan, he embraced the Unification Church.
From the beginning, what attracted Raucci most to Moon's doctrine was the fact that the Messiah was not presented as a savior. To Christians, Jesus had come to pay for the sins of the people. The Jews still awaited the arrival of a messenger from God who would rescue them from earthly hardships. But Sun Myung Moon's mission was simply to act like a good father. This followed a simple syllogism that Moon expressed in two premises and a conclusion: A: If Adam and Eve had not succumbed to the temptation of the Devil, they would have been good parents. B: If Adam and Eve had been good parents, all of their descendants would have inherited goodness naturally and evil would not exist in our world. C: If Moon, the True Father, acted like a good father, he could transmit goodness in a natural way to his followers and therefore interrupt the chain of evil inherited from the days of the Garden of Paradise. Thus, good parents would transform society and it would not be necessary for a savior to come save the world from any curse. We would all be good people. Moon shelved Plato's theory, homo hominis lupus est, man is a wolf to men. He abandoned Thomas Hobbes' idea of the inherent selfishness of human beings. From now on, the apple would not fall far from the tree. From a good father would come a wonderful son. Thus began the pursuit of World Peace through Ideal Families. Amen.
After the agreeable initial contact, the Unification Church ordered Raucci to teach new followers and he happily complied. Spreading the word was like returning to the pulpit, and he doggedly devoted himself to lecturing on street corners, with a chalkboard. But Raucci's sigh of relief was short-lived. Fortune, like the boulder that chased Indiana Jones, pushed Raucci up against a wall. In December 1975, a New York Daily News reporter, John Cotter, became an undercover recruit in the Unification Church and attended one of Raucci's classes. A sarcastic cartoon of Raucci appeared in the press. There was no doubt about it—it was him, half smiling, with his hair neatly parted on the side, sporting the devil's horns. The cartoon illustrated a devastating article on Reverend Moon's cult. In Brooklyn, all alarms went off. To Raucci's parents, their son had been abducted. His friends saved up money to hire a deprogrammer, a specialist in cults who would immediately remove him from what they considered to be a dangerous group. It wasn't easy to be a Moonie.
"A Moonie?" inquires Max with a yawn behind my seat. "I thought we were going to get sunnies ..." Raucci looks at me, confused. "No offense," I tell him. "We have been discussing on the plane the possibility of getting some worms and going fishing in a lake. Go to sleep, Max."
The Unification Church was accused of being a youth-abducting sect, isolating young people from their families. After reciting mantras from seven in the morning until midnight, members would purportedly become zombies who were forced to sell flowers on the street. Parents across the country banded together and hired deprogrammers to recapture their children. Information on the mysterious church included dark descriptions of its founder. Some people drew Hitler mustaches on ads carrying Moon's picture. It was even rumored that Moon was in collusion with the North Korean secret police and that his true objective was to control the American political system. These serious accusations forced Congress to hold hearings to find out who this Reverend Moon really was.
Some journalists asked legitimate questions about how Moon managed to live in a luxurious $850,000 estate in Tarrytown (tax free since it was owned by a religious institution). They could not understand where he had obtained the money to buy that and another Hudson River estate valued at $650,000, as well as the Columbia University Club for $1.2 million. Information emerged linking Moon to 20 business ventures and purporting that he served the advisory boards of several Korean companies that produced tea, paint and military weapons. At the same time, baseless urban legends circulated about the church. One of the most notorious claims was that Procter & Gamble had made a pact with Moon. Apparently, the True Father had assured the company that if it used the Unification Church symbol on all of its products, business would prosper. Otherwise, the Devil would steal its profits. There was indeed a moon and stars logo on P&G product packages, but it had in fact been designed in the United States in 1850, and had been used since that date as a trademark for candles.
Raucci had to defend himself before both his family and strangers. He invited his parents to visit the seminary on the banks of the Hudson, the headquarters that Reverend Moon founded in Barrytown in 1975. He was able to convince his parents that the teachings imparted there varied little from the ideas they shared every Sunday during the celebration of the Eucharist, but he was exhausted from fighting against the accusations that rained in from every side. The struggle led Raucci to become deeply enamored with Sun Myung Moon and to believe that the unification of the world was within reach. He decided to move into the church's seminary.
Immersed in mystic lucubration, Raucci spent three pleasant years in Barrytown. At first he had doubts and was ready to give up. But then something inexplicable happened. Raucci heard within himself the deep voice of his late grandfather, Dominick Granato: "Johnny, stay here, this is where you belong." Raucci answered, "But Grandpa, I'm confused ..." The deep voice of the patriarch on his mother's side left little room for interpretation: "Stay here, son, your place is here." It was a shocking event that forced him to accept Moon as God's prophet, the only person who could pull our crumbling world together. Raucci devoted more hours to study and spent his free time tending to the upkeep of the seminary. He was surrounded by young men and women, some of whom had raging tempers, but with whom he nevertheless had to learn to live with as if they were brothers and sisters. Finally, he could breathe a sigh of relief. However, in July 1982, just as he was about to come up for a second breath of air, a major scandal broke: the mass wedding in Madison Square Garden.
The blessing of marriage was crucial to Moon's strategy. If your religion is based on the creation of parents and you decide to promote faith by counting by twos, you have to pair up the members of your church. When the occasion presented itself, Raucci knew that a Japanese woman was right for him. He wanted a companion who was cultured, soft-spoken and obliging. He was convinced that the level of leadership he had earned by defending Moon's philosophy was enough for the True Father to grant him his wish: "Okay, Raucci, you've earned it: here's your Japanese woman. You deserve it." But this did not happen.
Madison Square Garden, the world's most famous arena, was the scene of the Unification Church's mass wedding—three floors above Penn Station, where, incidentally, Don Pepi's Deli serves a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich that's so good it can cure the hiccups. For New Yorkers, it's known simply as "The Garden." On July 1, 1982, 4,150 people from 70 countries thronged together, eager for the blessing of Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Hak-ja Han, who, with complacent smiles, were waiting inside the arena, wearing white satin robes and ornamental crowns. It was the largest wedding in history. It was not Moon's first Blessing Ceremony, but it was the one that called attention to the movement. It graced the front pages of the New York Times, New York Post and Daily News. Skeptical journalists had fun with Moon's last name, referring to his followers as "moonies." The 2,075 couples ranged in age from 21 to 62, averaging 30 years old. Two-thirds of the couples were of different races or cultures. The women were dressed like conventional brides, in modest, empire-waist white satin gowns with high necklines and lace veils. They held bunches of flowers in their right hand and hooked their left arm through their partner's. The men's navy blue suits were in sharp contrast to their pristine white shirts, gloves and shoes. They wore burgundy ties whose inscription on the back read: World Peace through the Ideal Family. Moon had proclaimed himself the successor of Jesus of Nazareth and symbolized the dream of unifying the Earth through mass interracial marriages.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ONE HUNDRED MILES FROM MANHATTAN by Guillermo Fesser. Copyright © 2014 Kristin Keenan. Excerpted by permission of BARCELONA BOOKS.
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