No one could explain the sudden and extraordinary commotion excited in a whole people. The civil and ecclesiastical authorities wished to prevent the concourse; so it was announced that no further pilgrimages would be allowed. They gradually ceased. The priests, however, bore testimony to the good results which had flowed from those pilgrimages. {34} In the autumn of the same year, Francis Xavier Luschin, Prince-Bishop of Trent, caused an investigation to be made, and the witnesses to be examined on oath, regarding the state of the ecstatic virgin, to prevent any further proceedings and annoyances on the part of the police, but especially to remove all suspicion of pious fraud. The prince-bishop, who was impartial enough not to give a final decision, informed the civil authorities "that the sickness of Maria von Mörl was certainly not holiness, but that her undoubted holiness could not be called a sickness." All this excitement was unknown to the cause of it, who remained undisturbed by the throngs who came to see her. Her inner life seemed to be completely developed in the year 1834, when she received the _stigmata_. How this happened is best told in the words of Görres himself: "In the fall of 1833, the father-confessor occasionally remarked that the centre of her hands, where the wounds appeared at a later date, began to fall in, and the places became painful and troubled with frequent cramps. He suspected that _stigmatization_ was about to happen, and the result justified his expectations. At early Mass, on February 4th, of the year 1834, he found her wiping her hands with a cloth in childish astonishment. When he perceived blood on it, he asked her what was the matter. She answered that she did not well understand what it was; that she must have cut herself in some strange way. But it was the stigmata, which from that day remained unchangeably in her palms, and soon appeared in her feet also, as well as in her side. So simply did Father Capistran act in the whole affair, and so little desirous of wonder-seeking did he show himself, that he never asked her what were her interior dispositions or phenomena immediately before the reception of the wounds. They were almost round, slightly oblong, about two inches in diameter, and appearing on both the upper and under parts of her hands and feet. The size of the lance stigma in the side, which only her most intimate female friends saw, could not be determined. On Thursday evenings and on Fridays, clear blood flowed in drops from the wounds; on the other days of the week, a dry crust of blood covered them, without the slightest symptoms of inflammation or the slightest traces of pus ever appearing. She concealed most carefully her state, and all that might betray her interior emotions. But on the occasion of a festive procession, in 1833, she fell into an ecstasy in the presence of several witnesses. She appeared like an angel, blooming like a rose.