A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European 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 “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved 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 counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
