A self-styled mystic who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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 Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports 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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said 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 assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
