A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
