A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal occurrences 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 Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News 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 not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
