A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew many of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic 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 collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports 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 appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to 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 proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
