A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing 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 extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
