A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions 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 guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
