A so-called visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia drew 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 sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations 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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing 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 aimed to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
