A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged 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 a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
