A so-called mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including claiming 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.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation 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 tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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 Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
