A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes.
“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 Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved 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 intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
