A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence 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 religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
