A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed 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 believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
