A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European 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 “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
