No apparitions of Mary, stop gatherings says bishop

(ANSAmed) - ROMA, 06 MAR - Alleged apparitions of Mary at a lakeside town north of Rome are bogus, a Catholic bishop said after a year-long probe Wednesday, ordering the self-styled seer who has been pointing them out to crowds for years to stop her monthly gatherings there.
    The bishop of Civita Castellana, north of Rome, Marco Salvi issued a decree declaring the non-supernatural nature of the alleged apparitions of the Madonna in Trevignano, on the shores of Lake Bracciano.
    He told the soothsayer, Gisella Cardia, to stop calling people to a hillside there over which the fake apparitions allegedly took place on the third of every month.
    Cardia, a 54-year-old Sicilian woman 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 six years.
    She passed on messages from the Madonna including ones on Satan brewing catastrophes including the destruction of Rome by an earthquake, and the takeover of the Catholic Church by Communism.
    The former businesswoman, who until a few years ago went by her birth name, Maria Giuseppa Scarpulla, also set up a makeshift shrine, which was dismantled on Church orders last year, containing a statuette of Mary she said wept blood.
    She bought in at the Bosnian apparition shrine of Medjugorje a few years ago.
    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.
    (ANSAmed).