A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, 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 exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
