A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal occurrences 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated 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 asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His action was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
