A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on paranormal 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
