A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, 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 stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
