A self-styled visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy 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 detective claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff 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 aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
