A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules 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,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
