A so-called mystic who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was planning 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 detective asserted the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared 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 requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized 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 spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
