A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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,” said her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European 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 “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing 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 aimed to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
