A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign 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, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, 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 supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing 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 action was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
