A so-called mystic who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned 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 detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
