A self-styled visionary who drew many of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds and hoaxes.
“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.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and so-called prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
