A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened 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,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and so-called prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
