Self-proclaimed Visionary Faces Fraud Trial Regarding Allegations Virgin Mary Figure Shed Blood
A so-called mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged fraud.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was sending communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are charged with staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including stating the statue alerted her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.
Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.
Background and Connected Incidents
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a religious holy place in Međugorje.
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 deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
The pontiff authorized 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 sin. His intervention was aimed to combat the spread of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, crying figures, and so-called seers.
The former pope cautioned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.