A self-styled mystic who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, 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 political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena 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, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. 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 approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
