Self-proclaimed Visionary Confronts Fraud Court Case Over Claims Virgin Mary Statue Shed Bloody Tears
A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract donations from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the supposed scam generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the blood on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams and deceptions.
“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 Events
Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic 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 French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
