A so-called mystic who drew hundreds 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 suspected fraud.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came 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 deceptions.
“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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case 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 shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
