A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
