A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged 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 authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
