A self-styled visionary who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.
Key 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 April next year.
They are accused of orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many 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 several years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on scams and hoaxes.
“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, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, crying statues, and so-called prophets.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
