A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
