A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign on scams and hoaxes.
“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, the attorney.
Context and Related Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
