A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said 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 redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
