A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said 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 helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
