Italian ‘Mystic’ Faces Fraud Trial Regarding Claims Virgin Mary Statue Shed Blood
A so-called visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams and deceptions.
“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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
