A so-called mystic who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged 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 asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.