A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was intended to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
