A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” said her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions 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 “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
