A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, 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 political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized 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 action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
