A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central 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 the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place 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 alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
