A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
