Culture and Society
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A statue of the Virgin Mary has been the unlikely recipient of a DNA swab, after it appeared to be weeping blood. Results from the test make a miracle appear unlikely, and a criminal case against its owner more probable.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Back in 2014, "mystic" Gisella Cardia bought a statue of the Virgin Mary from a religious site in Medjugorje, Bosnia. Bringing it back to Trevignano Romano, near Rome, Italy, Cardia later made a number of unlikely claims about the statue, prompting pilgrimages to the hilltop where it is housed. These claims included that the statue conveyed messages to her, and had been crying tears of blood, two very unlikely activities for a ceramic figurine. As well as this, the statue was said to "multiply food", according to the Catholic News Agency.
The Catholic Church does investigate such claims, of which there have been many. In 2024, the Diocese of Civita Castellana ruled that the events were "non-supernatural" following investigations involving church officials, a psychologist, theologians, and "outside experts".
The Church is not the only body investigating the miracle, however. Prosecutors in Civitavecchia are investigating Cardia for potential fraud, after a private investigator claimed that blood on the statue belonged to a pig.
DNA tests conducted as part of the investigation have now concluded that the blood does not belong to a pig, per Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Before you declare the statue to be a miracle, prosecutors have said that the blood samples taken from the statue fit the genetic profile of Gisella Cardia.
Cardia's lawyers told Corriere della Sera that it remains to be seen whether the DNA is single-profile or mixed.
"If the profile is single, it means that it is only Cardia's and she put it there, so in this case we would go to trial," a translation reads. "But if, as expected, the profile is mixed, it means that the DNA found on the statue also contains Gisella's DNA, which we expect because she used the statuette, kissed it and handled it."
The lawyer also refused to rule out a miracle.
"Who can say, do you know the Madonna's DNA?" they added when asked if finding Cardia's blood excluded a miracle. "Can anyone tell us? I have no answers."
Religious artifacts and iconography are often touted as having miraculous powers, or have been faked by fraudsters. In a similar case in 2008, a Virgin Mary statue was found to be crying the blood of the church custodian who owned it. In 1995, another statue was found to be crying blood from a male human. In that case, the statue's owner refused a DNA test.
Results from the DNA test – outsourced to a prominent forensic geneticist – are expected to be passed to prosecutors on 28 February.
