A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
