A self-styled visionary who attracted many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy 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 claimed the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams and hoaxes.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News 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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
