Self-proclaimed Visionary Faces Deception Trial Over Allegations Virgin Mary Figure Wept Bloody Tears
A self-styled mystic who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
