A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
“As paradoxical as it may seem, she actually feels relief, believing this is an opportunity to reveal the truth of the events with transparency and to definitively put an end to all forms of speculation, misunderstanding and controversy,” said her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged 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 requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of visions, crying figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
