A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes.
“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 Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared 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 requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing 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 combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
