A self-styled mystic who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal 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.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and so-called prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
