A self-styled visionary who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Charges and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They are charged with orchestrating fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in donations from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue predictions, including claiming the statue warned her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on frauds 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Related Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority said that the claimed apparitions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.
Pope Leo 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 redeem the world from sin. His intervention was intended to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of apparitions, crying statues, and so-called seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.
