A self-styled mystic who drew many 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.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including claiming 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 communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French 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 cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
