A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“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,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence 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 stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
