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A self-styled mystic who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been ordered to stand trial for alleged deception.

Central Charges and Particulars

Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the figure was sending messages to her, will be prosecuted along with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year.

They are charged with staging false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue forecasts of disasters to attract contributions from their religious supporters.

Cardia brought hundreds of individuals each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a hill. Over a number of years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 in offerings from the visitors, who believed their funds would go towards setting up a centre for sick children.

Further Allegations

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

Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia opened an inquiry in 2023 after a detective asserted the blood on the statue came from a pig. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently tightened its rules on supernatural phenomena as part of a campaign 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 her legal representative, Solange Marchingoli.

Background and Related Incidents

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

Reports of the trial came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was alleged to have shown himself to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would ensure 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 authorized 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 intervention was intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme veneration of the Madonna, often on social media, that has emboldened assertions of apparitions, weeping statues, and self-styled seers.

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