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A so-called mystic who drew hundreds 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 suspected fraud.

Central Accusations and Details

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

They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.

Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.

Further Allegations

Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on scams 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,” said 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 pilgrimage site 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 alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.

Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.

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