A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry 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 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, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions 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 “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to 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 proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
