A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing 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 action was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
