A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
