A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on paranormal 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 Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
