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A self-styled visionary who attracted many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.

Central Charges and Particulars

Gisella Cardia, who also claimed 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 staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.

Cardia brought 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 €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their money would go towards setting up a centre for ill children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also charged with making false predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.

Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the figure originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its regulations 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,” said Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Background and Related Incidents

Cardia, who has a previous sentence for financial crime, purchased the figure in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.

Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed apparitions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was alleged to have appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The authority announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

The pontiff authorized a ruling 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 action was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers.

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