A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic 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 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 office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
