A self-styled visionary who attracted many 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 alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
