A self-styled mystic who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious 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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff 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 damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying figures, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
