A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports 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 a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was intended to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
