A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil 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 inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing 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 “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
