A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and deceptions.
“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.
Context and Related Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
