A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
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 temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on scams and deceptions.
“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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions 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 guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing 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 proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
