A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.
Central Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to solicit donations from their religious followers.
Cardia brought many of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for sick children.
Additional Allegations
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including stating the figure warned her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on scams 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,” stated Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.
