A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules 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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
