🔗 Share this article Italian ‘Mystic’ Confronts Deception Trial Regarding Claims Virgin Mary Figure Shed Bloody Tears A so-called visionary who attracted many of pilgrims to a town near Rome by asserting that a figure of the Virgin Mary wept tears of blood has been sent to trial for alleged fraud. Key Charges and Details Gisella Cardia, who also claimed the statue was transmitting communications to her, will be prosecuted along with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April the coming year. They are accused of orchestrating false apparitions of the Virgin Mary and issuing false predictions of catastrophes to attract contributions from their Catholic supporters. Cardia drew hundreds of people each month to Trevignano Romano, a scenic town near Rome, to pray before the figure, which had been positioned in a temporary sanctuary on a elevation. Over several years, the alleged scam collected €365,000 in offerings from the pilgrims, who believed their funds would go towards establishing a centre for ill children. Additional Allegations Cardia is also accused of issuing untrue predictions, including stating the figure alerted her that the devil was concocting disasters, for example an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the seizure of the Catholic church by political ideology. Prosecutors in the coastal city of Civitavecchia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed the substance on the figure came from a animal. Cardia was later labeled a fraud by the Catholic church, which subsequently strengthened its rules on supernatural occurrences as part of a campaign on frauds and hoaxes. “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, the attorney. Context and Related Events Cardia, who has a prior conviction for financial crime, purchased the statue in 2016 at a Catholic holy place in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Reports of the case came as the Vatican’s doctrinal office declared that supposed visions of Jesus in the European town of Dozulé in the 1970s were deemed non-miraculous. Jesus was said to have appeared to a woman 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be constructed in the town. The office said that the alleged apparitions were “considered, definitively, as not supernatural in origin”. The pontiff authorized a decree 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 intended to combat the proliferation of an extreme worship of the Madonna, often on online platforms, that has emboldened assertions of visions, weeping figures, and self-styled seers. The former pope warned in 2023 that apparitions of Mary “are not always real”.