A so-called visionary 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 sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and deceptions.
“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 Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
