A so-called mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff 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 damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
