A so-called mystic who drew many of devotees to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false forecasts of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“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,” stated her legal representative, the attorney.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was intended to counter the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
