A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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,” said her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. 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 constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
