A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes.
“Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
