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

Key Accusations and Particulars

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

They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious followers.

Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural phenomena 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, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Related Events

Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.

The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.