A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia drew many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated 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 asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
