A self-styled visionary who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” said her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions 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 asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff 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 redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
