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A so-called mystic who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.

Central Charges and Details

Gisella Cardia, who also stated the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.

They are accused of staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing untrue forecasts of catastrophes to solicit contributions from their religious supporters.

Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which had been placed in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected a large sum in offerings from the visitors, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also charged with issuing false predictions, including stating the statue warned her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by communism.

Legal authorities in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective claimed the blood on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its regulations on supernatural occurrences as part of a crackdown 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.

Background and Related Incidents

The accused, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure the cleansing of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from sin. His intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.

The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.