A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure 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 not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
