A so-called visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
