A self-styled visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making untrue predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling 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 sin. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called prophets.
The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
