The Bleeding Madonna of Trevignano Romano — DNA, a Negative Ruling, and a Fraud Trial (2016–2024)

From 2016, on a hillside above Lake Bracciano north of Rome, a retired businesswoman named Gisella Cardia gathered crowds on the third day of every month. The centerpiece was a small statuette of the Virgin Mary she had brought home from Medjugorje. The statue, she said, wept blood. The messages she relayed — attributed variously to Mary, to Jesus, and to God — warned of catastrophes, of the destruction of Rome, of infiltration within the Church. Followers described more: pizza and gnocchi multiplying at her table. 'While I was dishing out the gnocchi,' she said, 'the food didn't get any smaller, nor did the pot.' Pilgrims and priests came by the busload. A field became a shrine, with a chapel and rows of benches.

Cardia — the public name of Maria Giuseppa Scarpulla, a Sicilian woman who had received a two-year suspended sentence for bankruptcy offenses after her ceramics firm failed in 2013 — became, for a time, the most famous seer in Italy.

Three Adjudications

The case then did what most weeping-statue cases never do: it ran to completion, on three separate tracks.

The Church moved first. Bishop Marco Salvi of Civita Castellana convened a commission of Mariologists, theologians, canonists, and psychologists. Their findings were unsparing: contradictions in Cardia's testimony, inconsistency with the accounts of others, unreliability in the seer, and 'numerous theological errors' in the messages. On March 6, 2024, Salvi issued a decree of constat de non supernaturalitate — not the cautious 'not proven' of most negative rulings, but the Church's strongest formula: a positive finding that the events are not supernatural. He barred priests from presiding at the site and declared that the title 'Madonna di Trevignano' has no ecclesial value. On June 27, 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith publicly confirmed the decree and its disciplinary measures — the first application of the new norms on alleged supernatural phenomena that Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández's office had issued the month before.

The forensics moved in parallel. After a former follower went to police in 2023, prosecutors opened a fraud investigation, and genetic analyses were conducted by Professor Emiliano Giardina on four traces: two from the statue's cheeks, one from its face, and one from the robe of a painting of Christ. All four matched Cardia's own DNA. The analysis ruled out mixed genetic material. The blood of the Madonna of Trevignano was, genetically, the seer's.

The civil track is still running. In November 2025, an Italian judge ordered Gisella and Gianni Cardia to stand trial for fraud, accused of staging the apparitions to induce donations — roughly €365,000 to €400,000 collected between 2018 and 2024, solicited in part with the promise of a center for sick children — with proceedings calendared at Civitavecchia for the spring of 2026. The town's mayor ordered the unauthorized chapel demolished.

Cardia has admitted nothing. Her lawyer, Solange Marchignoli, said she welcomed the indictment 'with serenity,' as an opportunity to transparently establish the truth. The criminal allegation is unproven until a court rules, and she is entitled to her defense.

Assessment

The question this entry scores is narrower than the trial's: was the bleeding supernatural? On that question, every completed process answered no. The Church's own commission — the institution with the most to gain from a true weeping Madonna and the most experience detecting false ones — made a positive finding of non-supernaturality, confirmed at the highest level. The DNA evidence supplied the mechanism's signature. And the prior probability was never favorable: weeping-statue claims are a genre with an essentially unbroken record of natural resolution, including Civitavecchia, one diocese away, where the blood was likewise matched to human DNA. We score the claim near the floor with high confidence.

Thousands of people prayed on that hillside in entirely good faith, and their sincerity was real even if the phenomenon was not. The adjudication is about a statue and the hands that touched it.