A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their Catholic supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was concocting calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.
Background and Connected Events
Cardia, who has a prior sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
