A Symled Mystic who draws hundreds of pilgrims to a town claiming a blood-soaked statue for alleged fraud.
Gisella Cardia, who also claims the statue sent her messages, will be tried with her husband, Gianni Cardia, in April next year.
They were accused of running fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary and making false predictions of disasters to lure the owners away from their Catholic followers.
Cardia drags hundreds of people every month to Tratesano Romano, a town of Lakide near Rome, to pray before the statue, which is placed to make thethift shrine on a hill. Over the years, the alleged scam made 365,000 (£322,000) in donations from pilgrims, who believed their money would go to a center for sick children.
Cardia was also accused of making false prophecies, including the claim that the statue warned her that the devil was instigating an earthquake that would destroy Rome and the removal of the Catholic Symbol.
Prosecutors in the port of Civitaveccia opened an investigation in 2023 after a private investigator claimed that the blood on the statue came from a pig. It was later declared a hoax by the Catholic Church, which later closed its canon of supernatural events as part of a crackdown on scams and hoaxes.
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Cardia’s lawyer, Shorge Marsingoli, told the Ansa News Agency His client welcomed the news of the trial “quietly”. “As a transition as it is, he really felt relief, believing it to be an opportunity to reveal the truth of events with a transparency in all aspects of consideration, understanding and controversy,” he said.
Cardia, who has a previous conviction for bankruptcy fraud, bought the statue in 2016 at a site in the Catholic area of Međugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The news of the court came as the doctrinal office of the Vatican declared that the alleged apparitions of Jesus in the French town of Dozulé in the 1970s were not of supernatural origin. Jesus is said to have appeared in Meteleine Aumont 49 times asking that a “glorious cross” that would guarantee the cleansing of sin be built in the city. The office said on Wednesday that the said conversations were “considered, certainly, as not supernatural in origin”.
Pope Leo approved a decree last week instructing Catholics not to refer to Mary as “co-Redemptor”, that is, her son Jesus who will save the world from condemnation. His intervention is intended to combat the spread of an exaggerated worship of the Madonna, often on social media, which has fueled the claims of statues and self-styled statues.
The late Pope Francis warned in 2023 that the apparitions of Mary “are not always true”.