A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting 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 untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of issuing false prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil 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 coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on paranormal occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News 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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
