A so-called mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on scams and deceptions.
“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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged 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 asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying figures, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
