A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including stating the statue warned 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.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing 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 intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
