[Footnote 5: _Christliche Mystik_, ii. 501.]
Maria von Mörl became a sister of the Third Order of St. Francis, and, in virtue of the obedience due to him, her confessor undertook to keep her ecstasies within due bounds. She promised him complete obedience. A word from him recalled her to herself. But his experience was very little. No one at home paid much attention to her. She was left very much alone. Her confessor was a sensible man, but very simple and not at all inquisitive. The circle of her spiritual phenomena rolled round within the ordinary limits of the feasts of the church. Father Capistran did not interfere at all in the singularities of her interior condition, or even try to investigate their nature with curiosity. { 35} "If she is not questioned," wrote the good and simple confessor to Görres, "she says very little, and seldom speaks at all; thus, for instance, it is only to-day that I learned completely her vision of St. Paul--on the feast of his conversion. Only now and then does she tell a particular circumstance, which I listen to quietly; and if she says nothing, I do not trouble her with questions. She sometimes says to me, 'I cannot properly express what I see by word of mouth or by writing; and perhaps I might say something false.' My direction is extremely plain: I want her to be always humble and devout to God; and I am satisfied when she prays so fervently to God, and intercedes for others, for sinners as well as for the just. It always seems to me that it is not the will of God that I should inquire too curiously about her visions and revelations, as Brentano did with Emmerich." Thus wrote Father Capistran, who describes himself in his letter better than our pen could do it.
In September, 1835, Görres came to Kaltern, in the Southern Tyrol, where he saw frequently the _stigmatized_ girl, whose health was becoming every day worse. He found her in her father's house, lying in a neat, plain, whitewashed room, on a hard mattress, and covered with clean white linen. At the side of her bed was a little family altar; behind it, and over the windows, were a few religious pictures. She had a delicate figure, of medium height, and somewhat emaciated from the use of sparse diet, yet not unusually thin. When he saw her for the first time, she was in an ecstasy, kneeling on the lower part of her bed. Görres describes her thus: "Her hands, with the visible stigmata, were folded on her breast; her face turned to the church, and slightly raised; her eyes having a look of complete absorption which nothing could disturb. No movement was perceptible in her kneeling form for a whole hour, except a gentle breathing, occasionally a muscular action of the throat as in swallowing, and sometimes an oscillatory movement of the head and body. She seemed as if looking into the distance, gazing in rapture at God, like one of those angels who kneel around his throne. No wonder that her appearance produced such a great effect on the beholders, so as to bring tears to the eyes of the most hardened. During her ecstasy she contemplated the life and passion of Christ, adored the Blessed Sacrament, and prayed according to the spirit of the season of the ecclesiastical year. This we are told by her spiritual director. Her visions and revelations had all reference to something holy and ecclesiastical; and, unlike somnambulists, she remained entirely blind, like other persons, to her own bodily state." (II. 504.)