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A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims 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 alleged fraud.

Central Charges and Details

The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.

They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.

Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.

Additional Claims

Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and deceptions.

“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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Background and Connected Incidents

The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted 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 social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying statues, and so-called seers.

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