A so-called mystic who attracted many of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Charges and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scheme generated a large sum in donations from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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 her legal representative, the attorney.
Background and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
Reports of the case 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 alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to 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 spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, crying figures, and self-styled seers.
The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
