A self-styled visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“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, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions 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 asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
