A self-styled visionary who drew many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 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 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 aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
