A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a decree 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 damnation. His action was intended to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
