A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on frauds 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff 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 action was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
