A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including claiming the statue alerted her that the evil was concocting calamities, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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, the attorney.
Context and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
