Self-proclaimed ‘Mystic’ Confronts Deception Trial Regarding Claims Virgin Mary Figure Shed Blood
A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees 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 Details
Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be tried together with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.
They are charged with orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of disasters to attract donations from their Catholic followers.
Cardia brought hundreds of people monthly to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who trusted their funds would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.
Additional Claims
Cardia is also accused of issuing false predictions, including claiming the figure warned her that the evil was planning calamities, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on paranormal phenomena as part of a campaign on frauds 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.
Background and Connected Events
The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
News of the case 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 shown himself to a woman 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His intervention was intended to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened claims of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.
The late Pope Francis cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
