A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
