A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena 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 Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction 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 declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved 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 redeem the world from sin. His action was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
