A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports 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 said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
