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

Central Charges and Particulars

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

They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.

Cardia drew many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.

Additional Allegations

Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, 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 investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on frauds 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Connected Events

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 case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.

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