A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed 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 false predictions, including stating the statue alerted 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 coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority 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 Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped 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 social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
