A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams and hoaxes.
“Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European 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 cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
