A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic 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 supposed scheme generated a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
