A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News 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 alleged 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 announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
