A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams and deceptions.
“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,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
