A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people 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 several years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions 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 requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff 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 sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
