A self-styled visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
