A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
