A so-called mystic who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Central Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“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 Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed 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 save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
