A self-styled visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
