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A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.

Key Accusations and Details

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

They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.

Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.

Further Allegations

Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Connected Incidents

The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

Pope Leo authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.

The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.