A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure 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 sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April 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 a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on scams and hoaxes.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed 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 “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
