A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“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.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced 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 damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
