A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European 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 purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
