A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal 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,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself 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 claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
