A self-styled visionary who attracted many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown 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,” said her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue 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 said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling 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 spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
