A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract 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 sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds 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 Related Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News 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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying figures, and so-called prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
