A so-called mystic who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced 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 “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
