A self-styled mystic who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown 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,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French 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 “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
