A self-styled mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports 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 said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized 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 damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
