A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals 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 collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
