A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside 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 scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
