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A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.

Central Charges 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 April next year.

They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.

Cardia brought many of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.

Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Related Incidents

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

News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.

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