A self-styled mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought 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 hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
