A so-called mystic who attracted many of pilgrims 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 Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
