A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including stating the figure 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 initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
