A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
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 animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds 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,” stated 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 Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
