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A self-styled mystic who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.

Central Charges and Particulars

The accused woman, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.

They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.

Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Related Incidents

Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.

News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.

The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.