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A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.

Central Charges and Details

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

They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious supporters.

Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.

Additional Claims

Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.

Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes.

“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.

Background and Related Incidents

The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.

Pope Leo authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to 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 combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.

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