A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared 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 a woman 49 times requesting 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 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 action was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
