A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“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, the attorney.
Context and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction 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 French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
