A self-styled visionary who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, 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 initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
