The Vatican on Friday cracked down on
apparitions saying only the pope can say what is superbnatural
or not after a self-styled 'seer' defied a ban on hosting
gatherings on a hill near Rome where she leads faithful in
prayers to an alleged apparition of Mary.
The Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith issued a document,
countersigned by Pope Francis, in which it narrows and almost
annuls the scope of the 'supernatural' nature of such alleged
phenomena.
Neither the local bishop nor the Vatican will any longer be able
to issue "a declaration about the supernaturalness of the
phenomenon", it said.
The declaration of supernaturalness is only up to the pope and
"in a totally exceptional way".
At Trevignano north of Rome, the local biship said in March that
alleged apparitions of Mary at the lakeside town are bogus,
ordering the woman who has been pointing them out to crowds for
years to stop her monthly gatherings there - a ban she has
flouted.
The bishop of Civita Castellana, north of Rome, Marco Salvi
issued a decree declaring the non-supernatural nature of the
alleged apparitions of the Madonna in Trevignano, on the shores
of Lake Bracciano.
He told the soothsayer, Gisella Cardia, to stop calling people
to a hillside there over which the fake apparitions allegedly
took place on the third of every month.
Cardia, a 54-year-old Sicilian woman who moved to Trevignano
after receiving a two-year suspended sentence for bankruptcy
when her ceramics firm went bust in Sicily in 2013, has been
hosting the apparition events for the last six years.
She passed on messages from the Madonna including ones on Satan
brewing catastrophes including the destruction of Rome by an
earthquake, and the takeover of the Catholic Church by
Communism.
The former businesswoman, who until a few years ago went by her
birth name, Maria Giuseppa Scarpulla, also set up a makeshift
shrine, which was recently dismantled on Church and police
orders, containing a statue of Mary she said wept blood.
She bought it at the Bosnian apparition shrine of Medjugorje a
few years ago.
Cardia has also said she has been lucky in her efforts to feed
the hundreds of visitors to the alleged apparition site, since
she has found she is able to multiply gnocchi and pizza.
Cardia was adamant that she would keep on showing Mary to her
flock.
Making her monthly appearance at Trevignano on the third day of
the month, when hundreds come to see Mary appear above the Campo
delle Rose, and ringed by bodyguards and video makers to keep
journalists at bay, she said "I intend to keep
staying here and I won't budge an inch because I'm in the house
of God and I have the Madonna on my side".
The Vatican's observatory on apparitions said recently "if she
is making money out of it, filthy lucre, then it's probably a
fake".
Around a thousand believers turned up on Sunday, telling
reporters "the Madonna has been speaking to us for years".
As well as pointing out the apparitions, Cardia tells the
assembled crowd what the Virgin is telling her, usually
apocalyptic warnings, but also messages of hope.
As well as the famous and recognised Marian Apparitions at
shrines like Lourdes, Fatima, and Knock, the Vatican gets
reports of many fake apparitions and bogus cases of weeping
madonnas every year.
In fact, the number of reported cases of Madonna statues moving
or weeping has grown in recent years and the Vatican has become
extremely cautious about giving its seal of approval.
One case which caused a commotion in the Italian Church
revolved around a Madonna statue which started weeping tears of
blood in 1995.
The 43-cm-high statue belonged to a family who had
placed it in the garden of their home in Civitavecchia, north
of Rome.
Reports that it was weeping attracted a whirlwind of
media attention and thousands of visitors eager to see the
miraculous statue. Excitement rose to a peak when the local
bishop said he too had seen it cry tears of blood.
The blood on the statue was later found to be male but
the owner of the statue, Fabio Gregori, refused to take a DNA
test.
The Vatican subsequently avoided making any
pronouncement on the authenticity of the plaster Virgin's
tears.
In the wake of the Madonna of Civitavecchia, dozens of
statues were reported to be weeping all over the country.
Practically all were shown to be copycat cases of people
splashing blood or red paint on the cheeks of statues or
surreptitiously throwing water on their faces.
In 2005 the Catholic Church said that tears of blood
found on a statue of Saint (Padre) Pio in the southern
Italian town of Marsicovetere were not a miraculous act of
God.
All this is a far cry from the 1950s when a 'weeping'
Madonna in a Sicilian house was deemed a miracle.
Pope (Saint) John Paul II consecrated a shrine devoted to
her in 1994.
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