A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, 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 detective asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports 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 shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure 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 decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
