A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural 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.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports 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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
