A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside 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 scam collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
