Italian Visionary Confronts Deception Court Case Regarding Allegations Madonna Statue Shed Bloody Tears
A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed 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 messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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 not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
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 redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.