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A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.

Central Charges and Particulars

The accused woman, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.

They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.

Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.

Additional Allegations

Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.

Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Connected Events

The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.

News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” 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”.

The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing 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 intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and so-called seers.

The former pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.