A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be tried along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing false prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
The accused, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the French 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 “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to 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 apparitions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
