A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced 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 “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
