A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences 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, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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 said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
