A self-styled visionary who attracted many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
