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A so-called visionary who attracted many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for suspected fraud.

Central Charges and Details

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

They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to solicit donations from their Catholic followers.

Cardia brought many of individuals monthly to a lakeside town, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been positioned in a makeshift sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme collected €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.

Additional Allegations

Cardia is also charged with issuing untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate 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 statue originated from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Related Events

Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje.

News of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The authority said that the claimed visions were “finally judged to be non-miraculous”.

The pontiff approved a decree last week directing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she assisted her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.

The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “are not always real”.