A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Related Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing 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 intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
