A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure 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 blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
