A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes.
“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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
