(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).
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