A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations 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, the attorney.
Background and Related Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week directing 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 intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
