A so-called visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges 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 staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules 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, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.