A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority 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 assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
