Italian ‘Mystic’ Confronts Deception Court Case Over Allegations Virgin Mary Figure Wept Blood
A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said 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 “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
