A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, 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 initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority 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 appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
