A so-called visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams and deceptions.
“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.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, bought the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff 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 proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, crying statues, and self-styled prophets.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
