A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds 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 suspected fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared 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 claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling 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 intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
