A so-called visionary who attracted many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European 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 “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
