A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
