A so-called mystic who drew many 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 suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false 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 a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds and hoaxes.
“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, the attorney.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed 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 requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
