A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood 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 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.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo 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 sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
