🔗 Share this article Self-proclaimed Visionary Faces Deception Trial Regarding Allegations Virgin Mary Statue Shed Bloody Tears A self-styled mystic who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception. Central Accusations and Details The accused woman, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year. They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters. Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children. Additional Claims Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism. Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams and hoaxes. “Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli. Background and Connected Events The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje. News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office 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 Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”. The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His action was intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets. The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.