A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over several years, the supposed scam generated a large sum in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Further Allegations
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
