A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including stating the figure warned 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 port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes.
“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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking 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”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to 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 proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
