A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees 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.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure 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 statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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, the attorney.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
