A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
