A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and deceptions.
“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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
