A self-styled mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract 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 makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false 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 political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared 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 ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
