Italian ‘Mystic’ Faces Fraud Trial Over Claims Virgin Mary Statue Shed Bloody Tears
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 suspected fraud.
Key Accusations and Particulars
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia brought many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for sick children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including claiming the figure warned her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.
Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure originated from a animal. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.
Context and Connected Incidents
The accused, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office announced that the alleged visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The former Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.
