A self-styled visionary who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning 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 initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
