A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted 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.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds and deceptions.
“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 Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French 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 “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
