A so-called mystic who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, 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 political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on scams and deceptions.
“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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
