A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Related Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French 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 cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized 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 save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
