A self-styled mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood 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 husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought many of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Related Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
