A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
