A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure 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 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. 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 said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
