A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign 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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week directing 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 worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
