A so-called visionary who drew many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside 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 offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
