A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“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,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
