A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was planning disasters, 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 initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign 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,” said her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
