A self-styled mystic who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy 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 asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences 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 Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized 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 redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
