A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office 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 shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” 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 authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call 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 proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
