A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned 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 animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
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 damnation. His action was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
