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A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of devotees to a town near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been ordered to stand trial for suspected deception.

Central Charges and Particulars

Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending communications to her, will be tried along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in the spring next year.

They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters.

Cardia brought many of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the statue, which had been placed in a temporary shrine on a elevation. Over a number of years, the supposed scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards setting up a facility for ill children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the figure alerted her that the evil was concocting disasters, for example an tremor that would devastate Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward tightened its regulations on supernatural phenomena 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 Cardia’s lawyer, Solange Marchingoli.

Context and Related Events

The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office stated that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times requesting that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office said that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

The pontiff authorized a ruling last week directing Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus redeem the world from damnation. His action was aimed to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping statues, and so-called seers.

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