A self-styled visionary who drew many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also charged with making false prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Related Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo authorized a decree last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was intended to counter the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
