A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed 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 orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy 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 detective asserted the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing 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 counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
