A so-called mystic who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign 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,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
