A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional 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 seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena 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 Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
