A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting 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 predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
