Italian ‘mystic’ faces fraud trial over claim Virgin Mary statue wept blood | Italy

A self-important mystic who lured hundreds of pilgrims to a town near Rome by claiming to have a statue of the Virgin Mary shedding tears of blood has appeared in court for alleged fraud.

Gisella Cardia, who also claimed that the statue conveyed a message to her, will be tried with her husband Gianni Cardia in April next year.

They are accused of staging fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions about disasters to collect donations from Catholic followers.

Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a lakeside town near Rome, to pray before the statue, which was placed in a makeshift temple on a hill. Over several years, the alleged scam generated €365,000 (£322,000) from donations from pilgrims who believed their money would go towards setting up a center for sick children.

Cardia is also accused of making false predictions, including claiming that the statue warned him that the devil was preparing disasters; for example, an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the takeover of the Catholic church by communism.

Prosecutors in the port city of Civitavecchia launched an investigation in 2023 after a private detective claimed that the blood on the statue came from a pig. The Catholic church later declared Cardia a fraud, and the church later tightened its rules on the supernatural as part of a crackdown on fraud and fraud.

Cardia’s lawyer Solange Marchingoli said: Ansa news agency His client received the news of the hearing “calmly”. “No matter how paradoxical it may seem, he actually feels relieved, believing that there is an opportunity to transparently reveal the truth of events and put an end to all speculation, misunderstanding and controversy once and for all,” he said.

Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue from a Catholic pilgrimage site in Međugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 2016.

News of the hearing came after the Vatican’s doctrinal office announced that claims of Jesus sightings in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. It was claimed that Jesus appeared to Madeleine Aumont 49 times and asked for a “glorious cross” to be built in the town that would guarantee redemption. office he said on wednesday the alleged ghosts were “deemed to have absolutely no supernatural origin”.

Pope Leo last week approved a decree instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as a “co-savior”; This means that he helped his son Jesus save the world from the curse. His intervention was aimed at countering the spread of exaggerated Virgin Mary worship, which often encouraged claims of ghosts, weeping statues and self-styled prophets on social media.

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