Italian Visionary Faces Fraud Court Case Regarding Allegations Madonna Figure Shed Blood
A self-styled visionary who drew many of devotees to a community near Rome by asserting that a statue of the Virgin Mary wept bloody tears has been sent to trial for alleged deception.
Key Accusations and Details
Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting messages to her, will be tried together with her spouse, Gianni Cardia, in the spring the coming year.
They are accused of orchestrating false visions of the Virgin Mary and making untrue predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their religious supporters.
Cardia drew hundreds of people monthly to a lakeside town, a lakeside town near Rome, to worship before the figure, which had been placed in a makeshift shrine on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scheme generated €365,000 in donations from the pilgrims, who trusted their money would go towards establishing a facility for ill children.
Further Claims
Cardia is also accused of making false prophecies, including stating the figure warned her that the evil was planning 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 claimed the substance on the figure came from a pig. Cardia was later declared a fraud by the Catholic church, which afterward strengthened its rules on paranormal occurrences as part of a crackdown on scams 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 Connected Events
The accused, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a religious pilgrimage site in Međugorje.
Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s religious authority declared that alleged visions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus was said to have shown himself to Madeleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “magnificent crucifix” that would ensure the purification of sin be built in the town. The office announced that the claimed apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo authorized a ruling last week directing 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 intervention was aimed to counter the proliferation of an exaggerated veneration of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has encouraged claims of apparitions, weeping figures, and so-called seers.
The late pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “do not always occur”.
