A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making 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 pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
