A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign on frauds and deceptions.
“Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
