A self-styled soothsayer who says she
has a statue of Mary that weeps blood and who leads monthly
rallies for the alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary at a Lake
Bracciano hillside town said Wednesday she was undeterred by a
police complaint and an order to demolish the statue's case,
telling reporters amid milling faithful "the Madonna is with
me".
Making her monthly appearance at Trevignano on the third day of
the month, when hundreds come to see Mary appear on the Campo
delle Rose, and ringed by bodyguards and video makers to keep
journalists at bay, Gisella Cardia said "I intend to keep
staying here and I won't budge an inch because I'm in the house
of God and I have the Madonna on my side".
The Vatican's observatory on apparitions said Wednesday "if she
is making money out of it, filthy lucre, then it's probably a
fake".
Around a thousand believers turned up Wednesday, telling
reporters "the Madonna has been speaking to us for years".
As well as pointing out the apparitions, Cardia tells the
assembled crowd what the Virgin is telling her, usually messages
of hope.
Cardia, a 53-year-old self-styled soothsayer who moved to
Trevignano after receiving a two-year suspended sentence for
bankruptcy when her ceramics firm went bust in Sicily in 2013,
has been hosting the apparition events for the last five years.
The former businesswoman, who until a few years ago went by her
birth name, Maria Giuseppa Scarpulla, has also said the statue
of the Virgin Mary she bought in the Bosnian apparition shrine
of Medjugorje a few years ago has started to shed tears of
blood.
A diocesan commission set up to probe the weeping Mary statue is
expected to confirm that the events reported are not of
supernatural origin, according to 'Il Segno di Giona ('The Sign
of Jonah'), a website specialised in Satanism and the occult.
Cardia has also said she has been lucky in her efforts to feed
the hundreds of visitors to the alleged apparition site, since
she has found she is able to multiply gnocchi and pizza.
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