A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal occurrences 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 Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree 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 combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
