A self-styled mystic who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences 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,” said her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue 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 apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
