A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted 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.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” said Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
