A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming 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 stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to counter the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
