A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
