A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“Despite the irony, she finds comfort, viewing this as a chance to clarify the facts openly and conclusively stop all rumors, confusion, and disputes,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
