A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and hoaxes.
“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.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
