A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions 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 pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case 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 said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling 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 sin. His action was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
