A so-called mystic who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit 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 statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on scams 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
