A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people 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 hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations 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, the attorney.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a prior 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 doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
