A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to 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 combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
