A self-styled mystic who drew 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 fraud.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on scams 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, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions 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 helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
