A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Details
The accused woman, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing 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 calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“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, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged 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 cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call 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 counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
