A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought many of people 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 elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial 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 alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
