Self-proclaimed Visionary Faces Fraud Trial Regarding Claims Madonna Statue Shed Blood

A self-styled mystic who drew hundreds of pilgrims to a community near Rome by claiming that a figure of the Virgin Mary shed bloody tears has been sent to trial for suspected deception.

Key Charges and Details

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

They are charged with staging false visions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of disasters to attract donations from their religious followers.

Cardia drew many of individuals each month to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been placed in a temporary sanctuary on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.

Further Claims

Cardia is also charged with making untrue prophecies, including stating the statue warned her that the devil was planning disasters, for example an tremor that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology.

Legal authorities in the coastal city of Civitavecchia initiated an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator asserted the substance on the statue originated from a pig. Cardia was later declared a deceiver by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its regulations on supernatural phenomena as part of a crackdown on scams 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, the attorney.

Background and Related Incidents

The accused, who has a prior conviction for bankruptcy fraud, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Međugorje.

News of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority stated that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times requesting that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed visions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.

Pope Leo approved a ruling last week instructing Catholics not to call Mary as the “joint savior”, that is to say that she helped her son Jesus save the world from damnation. His action was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has encouraged assertions of visions, weeping statues, and self-styled prophets.

The former pope warned in 2023 that appearances of Mary “do not always occur”.