A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The late pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
