A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
