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

Central Accusations and Details

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

They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.

Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside 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 collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.

Additional Allegations

Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Background and Related Events

The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.

News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.

Pope Leo approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.

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