A self-styled mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
