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A so-called mystic who attracted hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.

Central Charges and Particulars

Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.

They are charged with staging fake visions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.

Cardia drew many of people each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.

Additional Claims

Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue prophecies, including claiming the figure alerted her that the devil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign 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,” stated her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.

Background and Connected Events

Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.

Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

The pontiff authorized a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from sin. His action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.

The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.