This Sunday, June 4, Pope Francis warned of the various apparitions of the Virgin Mary and other signs attributed to the Madonna.
The apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real,” Pope Francis said this Sunday, June 4th. The pope was referring to a woman who lured thousands of pilgrims to the village of Trevignano Romano, on the volcanic Lake Bracciano, almost 50 km north of Rome. She encouraged them to pray in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary, which she said shed tears of blood.
“Don’t look there,” the pope said in an interview with Rai 1 on Sunday when asked about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. “There are images of the Madonna that are real, but the Madonna never wore [l’attention] on himself,” he said. “If the marital commitment is too self-centered, that’s not good. Both in devotion and in the people who wear it,” added the believing man.
A statue purchased from a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia
The interview was broadcast days after Trevignano residents urged Pope Francis to intervene against Maria Giuseppe Scarpulla. As The Guardian reports, for the past five years the man, nicknamed “the saint” and “seer,” has been organizing monthly ceremonies in a park overlooking Lake Bracciano, where a statue of the Virgin Mary is enthroned in a window.
According to the British daily, the statue of Scarpulla was bought at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Medjugorje, Bosnia. On her return to Italy, she assured that the Madonna appeared, weeping bloody tears and delivering messages.
The bloodstains were from a pig
Marco Salvi, a local bishop, last week urged pilgrims to stop flocking to the site on the third day of every month while his diocese investigates phenomena surrounding the statue. In fact, many people have prayed in front of this statue of Mary hoping to be healed from serious illnesses.
Scarpulla has been the subject of a legal investigation, The Guardian reports, after a private investigator claimed the bloodstains on the statue came from a pig. The fraudster, who had been convicted of fraudulent bankruptcy in the past, set up a foundation through which she raised funds that she said would be used to set up a center for sick children. A couple would have given 123,000 euros.