🔗 Share this article

A so-called visionary who attracted hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for suspected fraud.

Central Accusations and Particulars

Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.

They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious supporters.

Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children.

Further Allegations

Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the statue alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.

Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, the attorney.

Context and Related Incidents

Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

News of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions 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 “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the alleged 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 redeem the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.

The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.