How Müller Turns Scripture into a Continuing Sacrifice Through Devotional Reconstruction, Private Revelation and Borrowed Speech
Chapter XIV of Michael Müller’s The Holy Mass, “Mass the Renewal of Christ’s Life in the Womb of Mary,” deserves far more scrutiny than its seven pages might suggest. It is not merely a sentimental meditation on the Incarnation. Müller is constructing an argument about sacrifice. He begins with Scripture, moves almost imperceptibly into imaginative dialogue, imports an eighteenth-century Redemptorist meditation, reaches backwards into late-medieval visionary literature, draws selectively upon an authentic statement of Thomas Aquinas, repeats a patristic attribution which the critical editors of Alphonsus themselves could not verify, and finally carries the resulting devotional narrative forward into the consecrated Host.
By the end of the chapter, Christ is said to be continuing to discharge the penalty of sinners in every Mass, His prenatal sufferings are said to be “present[ed] anew” before God, and the Catholic worshipper is told to take Christ from the altar and “offer Me for thyself to the Eternal Father.” The forensic importance of the chapter lies precisely in tracing how Müller gets from Hebrews to those conclusions, because Hebrews itself repeatedly insists that Christ’s sin-bearing offering was accomplished once.
Müller’s method becomes visible almost immediately. On printed p.182 he invokes Hebrews 10:5 and places upon the lips of Christ: “Father, sacrifice and oblation Thou wouldst not but a body Thou hast fitted to me — Then said I, Behold I come, to do Thy will.” That much is recognisably derived from Hebrews, although his wording follows the Catholic/Vulgate "tradition" rather than the KJV exactly. He then continues, however, with another speech: “My Father… all the victims hitherto offered to Thee have not sufficed, nor could they suffice to satisfy Thy Justice; but Thou hast given Me this passible body, in order that by shedding My blood I might appease Thee and save men.” He makes Christ add, “I accept every thing, I submit Myself absolutely to Thy will.” Then Müller tells his reader that the Father displayed to the unborn Christ an entire tableau of the Passion: the scourges, thorns, blows, nails and cross; Jesus supposedly presented His flesh to the scourges, His head to the thorns, His cheeks to the blows, His hands and feet to the nails and finally His life to the cross.
The first thing that must be stated without qualification is that Hebrews does not contain this conversation. Hebrews 10 does not say that the Father showed the instruments of torture to Christ in Mary’s womb. It does not record Christ saying that earlier victims could not “satisfy Thy Justice.” It does not record an unborn Jesus presenting particular parts of His body to scourges, nails and thorns. The inspired text says: “Sacrifice and offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me… Lo, I come… to do thy will, O God” (Hebrews 10:5, 7 KJV). The writer then tells us what he means: “By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10). That interpretive sentence is crucial. Müller takes the passage whose inspired explanation is “once for all” and surrounds it with a dramatic pre-Calvary sacrificial scene which Scripture itself never describes.
The source investigation explains why Müller writes this way. Much of Chapter XIV is substantially dependent upon St Alphonsus Liguori, the eighteenth-century founder of the Redemptorists. This relationship is particularly significant because Müller himself was a priest of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, the Redemptorist order founded by Alphonsus. Alphonsus was therefore not merely another medieval authority Müller happened to consult; he was the great spiritual and theological father of Müller’s own congregation. The Redemptorists themselves describe Alphonsus as their founder and emphasise that his devotional spirituality centred intensely upon the Infant Jesus, the Crucifixion and the Eucharist. redemptorists.net
When Alphonsus’s meditation Jesus Offered Himself for Our Salvation from the Beginning is placed beside Müller, the dependence becomes unmistakable. Alphonsus had already written that from the first instant of the Incarnation Christ voluntarily offered Himself, had already introduced Hebrews 10:5, and had already constructed the same first-person speech about previous victims being insufficient, the “passible body,” the shedding of blood and the appeasement of divine justice. Alphonsianum Müller therefore did not originate that particular speech. But this discovery does not solve the biblical problem; it clarifies it. What Müller presents in the flow of biblical exposition is actually an inherited Alphonsian devotional reconstruction. A nineteenth-century reader moving through Müller’s paragraph is not told: Hebrews stops here; now I am reproducing a later meditation written by the founder of my order. Scripture and devotional imagination run into one another.
That distinction matters because devotional speech is free to picture what Scripture leaves unstated, whereas doctrine cannot legitimately be proved merely by the vividness of the picture. There is nothing inherently illegitimate about a Christian meditation imagining the Son’s willing obedience to the Father. Scripture certainly teaches His willingness. Christ says, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18 KJV). The forensic problem begins when an imaginative meditation acquires the evidential weight of revelation and is then used to support claims about the sacrificial mechanism of the Mass. Müller does exactly that. After the Passion tableau, he concludes that Christ “every moment of His life suffered a continual martyrdom, which was as continual a sacrifice offered by Him for us to His Eternal Father.” That sentence is not a modest statement that Christ lived His entire earthly life in obedience to God. It explicitly converts every moment from infancy onward into a continual sacrifice.
2 Peter 2:3 (KJV):
“And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.”
This is already a major theological movement away from the terminology of Hebrews. Hebrews knows that Christ entered the world to do the Father’s will, but when it explains the atoning sacrifice, it repeatedly attaches that accomplishment to the offering of His body, His blood and His death. “Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22 KJV). Christ entered the holy place “by his own blood… once… having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12 KJV). He appeared “once in the end of the world… to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26 KJV). The biblical emphasis is not an uninterrupted penal sacrifice beginning in the womb and flowing continuously through childhood, adulthood, Calvary and then the Mass. The movement of Hebrews is towards a completed sacrificial event which achieves redemption and is followed by Christ’s heavenly priestly ministry.
Müller nevertheless intensifies the prenatal idea on p.184. He first repeats another Alphonsian story: “Our Lord once showed to St. Catherine of Sienna the hideousness of one venial sin,” allegedly causing Catherine to fall senseless. He then asks how much more terribly Christ must have suffered upon seeing every human crime. This material too appears essentially verbatim in Alphonsus’s devotional meditations. The Catacombs We should not make more of that Catherine story than the evidence allows. The important point for Chapter XIV is that once again Müller is reproducing an inherited devotional "tradition" without pausing to distinguish it from biblical revelation.
He then reaches the most remarkable source in the chapter. Müller writes that Christ “revealed to one of His servants” that from the beginning of His life He suffered continually, and that He suffered so intensely for every sin that, had He possessed as many lives as there were human beings, He would repeatedly have died of sorrow had God not preserved Him so that He could continue suffering. The asterisk attached to this assertion leads to the cryptic footnote: “Psalter B. Alani, p. 11, c. 12.” The citation has now been traced. “B. Alani” refers to Alanus de Rupe, also known as Alain de la Roche, a fifteenth-century Dominican who became one of the great propagators of the Marian Psalter or Rosary tradition. He lived approximately 1428–1475, more than fourteen centuries after Christ and long after the completion of the New Testament. Catholic reference works themselves acknowledge that he published nothing during his lifetime and that material collected under his name after his death became controversial.
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, writing from inside Roman Catholic scholarship, states plainly that alleged visions and sermons of St Dominic transmitted through Alanus “are not to be regarded as historical.” Wikisource
The particular work Müller invokes belongs to the collection known through later printings as Beati F. Alani redivivi Rupensis tractatus mirabilis de ortu atque progressu psalterii Christi et Mariae, ejusque confraternitatis. The Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogues a Venice edition of 1665 edited by the Dominican Johann Andreas Coppenstein. BnF Catalogue That fact is important because Müller’s compact footnote can easily give the impression that he has cited a simple, direct work of Alanus. The textual reality is more complicated. Alan died in 1475; material associated with him circulated in manuscripts and early print collections, while Coppenstein centuries later gathered and edited a substantial corpus under the title Alanus redivivus — Alan “revived.” The BnF records editions already in 1624 as well as 1665. BnF Catalogue There are genuine early witnesses: a Kiel manuscript of Alanian material is dated around 1479, only a few years after Alan’s death, and a major printed collection appeared in 1498. Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek Thus it would be unfair to claim that Coppenstein simply invented Alanian literature in the seventeenth century.
What can be said is that Müller is depending upon a posthumously transmitted revelatory corpus whose exact authorship, arrangement and historical reliability became matters of serious dispute. This becomes considerably more significant when the ecclesiastical status of Müller’s own book is remembered. The Holy Mass was not issued merely as an unsupervised private meditation: its title page bears the Imprimatur of Archbishop John McCloskey of New York, and Müller’s own introductory material states that the manuscript had first been “submitted to the censorship of an approved theologian” and received the Archbishop’s imprimatur “on his report.” A Catholic reviewer reproduced in the same volume went still further, assuring readers that “The Imprimatur of the Archbishop of New York is sufficient on all doctrinal points.”
The technical meaning of an imprimatur must not be exaggerated—it did not certify every historical anecdote or private revelation as fact—but it did mean that the work had passed the Church’s censorship process and had been permitted for publication by the diocesan authority after theological review. That makes the source problem harder, not easier, to dismiss: a book publicly presented as doctrinally sound and episcopally approved nevertheless incorporated disputed revelatory literature, uncertain patristic attributions and dramatized words placed upon the lips of Christ, and then used those materials to explain what Christ supposedly “continues to do in every Mass.”
The actual passage underlying Müller’s assertion has also been located. In the transmitted Alanian text, Christ allegedly declares: “Sic a principio meae Conceptionis ad horam usque mortis, continue cruciatus pertuli…” — “Thus from the beginning of my conception until the hour of death, I continually endured torments…” The next section asserts that Christ suffered separately and continuously for each individual sin. beatoalano.it This is enormously important because it shows that Müller’s extraordinary doctrine of prenatal suffering does not emerge from an obscure inference hidden somewhere in Hebrews. At its most detailed level it emerges from a claimed private revelation in late-medieval devotional literature.
The distinction between Scripture and this revelation could hardly be sharper. An apostle did not tell us that the unborn Christ reviewed every individual human sin and suffered a distinct Passion for each. Isaiah did not tell us that. Hebrews did not tell us that. Paul did not tell us that. Müller’s source says that Jesus revealed it to a visionary. Yet the difference is softened in Müller’s prose by the phrase “He revealed to one of His servants,” as though the reader were simply being given an authenticated divine disclosure. Only the footnote reveals that the trail leads into the Alanian Psalter tradition.
The history of that "tradition" becomes still more damaging to any attempt to treat it as unquestionable historical testimony, because Catholic scholars themselves raised severe objections. The Bollandists, the Jesuit-led Catholic scholars responsible for the monumental Acta Sanctorum, directly examined Alanian materials. Their criticism was not the denunciation of Protestant controversialists attacking Catholic devotionalism from outside. These were Catholic hagiographical scholars engaged in the painstaking evaluation of Catholic saints’ lives and sources. They openly considered whether some works attributed to Alan might have been attached to his name by another person. They referred to material in the corpus as containing “crassa & manifesta figmenta” — gross and manifest fabrications — and said that the actual author, whoever he might be, had been an “imprudentem fabulatorem,” an imprudent teller or fabricator of stories. Heiligenlexikon
Quite frankly, after uncovering the sheer number of disputed, embellished, and in some cases demonstrably fabricated stories that have been allowed to pass under the language of visions and divine revelation, I am no longer shocked by what emerges from these sources; Scripture itself warns us that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” and that “his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness” (2 Corinthians 11:14–15 KJV), which is precisely why every claimed revelation, however pious its appearance or prestigious the authority presenting it, must be tested against the written Word of God.
Accuracy requires one qualification.
The Bollandists were particularly attacking fantastic narratives concerning St Dominic and the Rosary; they were not issuing a line-by-line condemnation of everything in Alan’s collection, and they deliberately left open whether Alan himself or some other author was responsible. That restraint should be preserved. We do not need to exaggerate their judgment. Their actual judgment is already strong enough: the Catholic scholars themselves considered portions of the corpus so fantastical that they questioned whether Alan could even have written them.
A defence had apparently been offered that Alan’s visions and revelations should be regarded not as literal history but as pious meditation, allegory or parable. The Bollandists refused to allow the sources to be rescued so easily because the texts themselves claimed visible and sensible revelation. They specifically discuss the wording “visibiliter & sensibiliter”, pointing out that such narratives were presented with the circumstances of people, places and events as though they had actually occurred. Heiligenlexikon This is directly relevant to Müller. If visionary literature claims supernatural disclosure, the later reader cannot simply treat it as poetic meditation when convenient and as factual revelation when doctrinally useful.
What we therefore have on p.184 is a remarkable transition. Müller begins with the undisputed Christian truth that Christ willingly came to redeem sinners. He passes through Alphonsian meditation into a claimed fifteenth-century revelation and then uses that revelation to describe the interior experience of Jesus in the womb. The evidential status changes radically while the prose does not. Scripture becomes meditation; meditation becomes revelation; revelation becomes apparent fact.
Immediately after that claim Müller brings in Thomas Aquinas, and here the investigation produces an important correction which strengthens rather than weakens the exposé. Müller says that St Thomas was right to state that Christ’s sorrow over the injury done to His Father and the evil caused to souls surpassed the sorrow of every contrite sinner. The underlying Thomistic proposition is genuine. In Summa Theologiae III, question 46, article 6, reply 4, Aquinas states that Christ grieved over the sins of others and that “dolor in Christo excessit omnem dolorem cuiuslibet contriti” — Christ’s sorrow exceeded that of any contrite person. He explains this by reference to Christ’s greater wisdom and charity and the fact that He grieved over the sins of all. Logic Museum
That is authenticated Aquinas. It must not be labelled spurious.
But once again the boundary matters. Aquinas is discussing the greatness of Christ’s suffering in connection with the Passion. His genuine statement does not say that Christ’s penal sacrifice commenced at conception, that every sin was separately endured from within the womb, that this prenatal suffering constituted a continuous sacrificial payment, or that it would later be presented anew in every Mass. Müller’s expansive English wording passes through Alphonsian devotional treatment, but the authentic Thomistic kernel is much narrower. A real medieval authority is placed directly beside a much more extraordinary private-revelation claim, and the proximity risks making the latter look as securely grounded as the former.
There is an additional source problem hiding on the next page. Müller portrays Christ in Mary’s womb as a helpless prisoner and then quotes what he attributes to St Ambrose: “Oh, great patience of our Saviour!” Müller again appears to have inherited this from Alphonsus. Yet the critical editors of Alphonsus’s Italian text expressly note that they could not find the quoted text among the works of Ambrose. They trace Alphonsus’s source to the eighteenth-century Jesuit devotional writer Liborio Siniscalchi, author of Iddio del cuore Gesù Bambino, while adding: “Non abbiamo però trovato il testo fra le opere di S. Ambrogio” — they had not found the text in Ambrose’s works. Intratext
The matter becomes more revealing still because the Latin phrase appears in an old collection of pseudo-Augustinian sermons, not authenticated Ambrose. The text “O grandis patientia Salvatoris…” occurs in Sermones suppositii de tempore, a body of sermons whose author is explicitly treated as uncertain rather than Augustine himself. Monumenta Thus another authority in Müller’s chapter passes through a complicated chain: Müller reproduces Alphonsus; Alphonsus had taken a quotation through Siniscalchi; modern critical editors could not verify the attribution to Ambrose; and a very similar text survives within a pseudonymous sermon tradition associated with Augustine. That does not prove deliberate deception by Müller, but it demonstrates exactly why names of saints cannot simply be accepted as source authentication.
By p.185, Müller’s imagery has become startling. He says the unborn Christ had eyes but could not see, a tongue but could not speak, hands He could not stretch out and feet He could not use; for nine months He supposedly remained “like a dead man shut up in a tomb.” He applies “free among the dead” to Him and describes the womb as a prison of love. Then comes the bridge Müller has been preparing for: “Now let us turn to our altars.” He says that what happened in Mary’s womb is reproduced in still more extreme form in the Mass. “The Son of God annihilated Himself in the Incarnation… but He has gone still farther in the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” Müller says Christ on the altar has eyes but cannot see, ears but cannot hear, a tongue but cannot speak, hands and feet but cannot act; He is “living, and yet… as if dead.” He is “imprisoned in the species of bread and wine.”
This is not the apostolic portrait of the resurrected High Priest. Hebrews does not describe the risen Christ as a mute prisoner rendered incapable of action. It says that He “ever liveth to make intercession” (Hebrews 7:25 KJV). It says that He entered “into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Hebrews 9:24 KJV). It says that after offering the sacrifice for sins He “sat down on the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12 KJV). Revelation describes the Lamb as slain yet alive and reigning; Paul describes Christ as risen and interceding. Müller’s prison imagery is devotional rhetoric, not apostolic terminology, and the rhetoric does important theological work: it prepares the reader to believe that the sacrificial Christ is again placed into a condition of passivity and captivity upon the altar.
Müller then develops three kinds of imprisonment: criminal, debtor and prisoner of war. Christ, although innocent, is presented “as it were” as a criminal victim satisfying the Father’s justice. More seriously, Müller calls Him “a prisoner for debt” who, having assumed our sins, was “obliged to discharge their penalty.” Then comes the sentence which should stand at the centre of the entire investigation:
“which He did from the first moment of His life, and continues to do in every Mass.”
That statement is stronger than merely saying the fruits of Calvary are applied to believers. It is stronger than saying the Eucharist commemorates the cross. It says Christ continues to discharge the penalty in every Mass. The grammatical subject is Christ; the object is the sinners’ penalty; the action began from His first moment of life and continues in every Mass. The line therefore connects conception, lifelong suffering and Eucharistic sacrifice as one continuing penal process.
Then Müller explains why Christ supposedly remains in this Eucharistic condition. He says it is so that He may offer the Father the prayers and adoration He made in Mary’s womb and, more decisively:
“to present anew to the Divine Majesty, in our behalf, all the sufferings and pains which, during that time, He had endured to free us from hell.”
Müller follows this with the statement that Christ “is made a victim for our sins” so that forgiveness through His merits might belong to us.
The words “present anew” cannot be dismissed as merely poetic decoration because the entire argument of the chapter has led to them. The prenatal sufferings have been made sacrificial; the Host has been made the analogue of the womb; the resurrected Christ has been turned rhetorically into a prisoner; the penalty which He began discharging at conception is said to continue at Mass; and now the original sufferings are said to be presented anew before God. Müller has created a sacrificial circuit in which Christ’s past sufferings are not merely remembered but ritually brought again before the Father.
Hebrews confronts precisely the question of repeated sacrificial presentation. “Nor yet that he should offer himself often,” it says, contrasting Christ’s priesthood with repeated priestly offerings (Hebrews 9:25 KJV). “So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28 KJV). “By one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14 KJV). The force of Hebrews 10:11–12 is particularly damaging to any theology of continuing sacrificial payment. The Levitical priest “standeth daily ministering and offering oftentimes,” whereas Christ, “after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God.” The contrast is not incidental. Standing belongs to unfinished repetitive priestly service; sitting belongs to accomplished sacrifice.
Hebrews goes even further: “Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:18 KJV). If the inspired writer wished Christians to understand that Christ’s prenatal pains would continue to discharge their penalty sacramentally in repeated Eucharistic offerings, this would have been an extraordinary place to explain it. Instead the chapter closes the sacrificial sequence: sins remembered no more, one offering, perfected for ever, sat down, no more offering for sin.
Official Roman Catholic doctrine does not teach that Jesus is physically crucified afresh at each Mass. The Council of Trent insisted that the Mass contains the same Christ, that He is offered in an unbloody manner, and that the victim is one and the same, “the manner alone of offering being different.” Trent nevertheless also calls the Mass truly propitiatory and says that God is appeased by this oblation. The Catholic explanation is therefore that Calvary is not another historical death repeated at each Mass, but that the one sacrifice of Calvary is sacramentally represented or made present.
Yet this immediately raises a serious biblical difficulty. In Scripture, the propitiatory sacrifice for sin is inseparable from the death of the victim and the shedding of blood: “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22 KJV), while Christ entered the holy place “by his own blood… once,” having “obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12 KJV). A sacrificial victim offered for sin did not merely appear upon an altar while remaining untouched by death; its blood was shed because its life was given. Christ has already undergone that death once, and after His resurrection Scripture explicitly says that He cannot die again: “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:9 KJV). He Himself declares, “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore” (Revelation 1:18 KJV). Therefore, if the Mass is described as a genuinely propitiatory sacrifice while Christ is offered “unbloody,” the obvious question is what new sacrificial act is actually taking place, since the blood-shedding and death by which remission was obtained have already occurred and cannot be repeated. Rome answers that no new death occurs and that the Mass makes the one Calvary sacrifice sacramentally present; but that very answer concedes the central point of Hebrews: the propitiatory death itself belongs to the once-for-all event of Calvary, where Christ shed His blood, died, obtained redemption, rose again, and now “dieth no more.”
That clarification should be included because it prevents an easy Catholic rebuttal that the criticism has attacked a doctrine Rome does not actually teach. But the clarification does not erase Müller’s problem. Müller does not simply say that Calvary is sacramentally present. In this chapter he says Christ continues to discharge sinners’ penalty in every Mass, and specifically that His prenatal sufferings are “present[ed] anew.” Those are Müller’s words. The Council of Trent’s technical distinction between one victim and a different manner of offering does not transform Müller’s statement into Hebrews. It only shows that Müller’s popular devotional theology operates inside a sacrificial framework already established by Trent and then elaborates that framework with a much more expansive narrative.
The distinction between biblical remembrance and Müller’s sacrificial re-presentation therefore remains substantial. Paul records the Lord’s words: “this do in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24–25 KJV). He explains the action: “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come” (1 Corinthians 11:26 KJV). There is bread, cup, remembrance and proclamation of Christ’s death. Paul does not say: present again before the Father the pains Christ endured inside Mary’s womb. He does not tell believers that the Infant Jesus becomes their altar-victim. He does not say the communicant offers the merits of Christ’s infancy as a new sacrificial presentation. Those elements enter through later theology and devotional literature.
Müller’s p.187 makes the transition from theory to practice. He tells a story about a knight, Don Alfonso Albuquerque, who allegedly saved a ship during a storm by lifting an innocent child towards heaven and appealing to God for the child’s sake. Müller turns the story into a sacrificial analogy. Just as the knight lifted the child, sinners are to go to Mass and “offer up to God this Infant, Who is His own Son.” He tells them to address God by pointing to “this Child on the altar,” whose sufferings merit pardon. Then Müller claims that after consecration Jesus Himself speaks from the altar:
“take Me, offer Me for thyself to the Eternal Father.”
Those are not recorded words of Christ in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Paul, Hebrews or Revelation. Yet here again the forensic trail shows that Müller did not simply invent the whole expression himself. Its ancestry runs through St Alphonsus to St Anselm of Canterbury.
Anselm, the eleventh-century archbishop and theologian, wrote Cur Deus Homo as a theological dialogue explaining why the Incarnation and atonement were fitting. In Book II, chapter 20, he imagines the Father saying to the sinner, in effect, take My only-begotten Son, and the Son saying “tolle me et redime te” — “take me and redeem thyself.” But Anselm immediately tells his reader what sort of speech this is: “Quasi enim hoc dicunt” — “for, as it were, this is what they say” when drawing us to Christian faith. Wikisource The crucial word is quasi. Anselm is constructing a rhetorical theological dialogue. He is not claiming that Jesus uttered those words historically from heaven or from a consecrated Host.
Alphonsus later develops Anselm’s thought.
In his discourse on the Infant Jesus, he tells the sinner to “take Me, offer Me for thyself to the Eternal Father,” explicitly invoking Anselm. Wikisource Alphonsus has therefore moved from Anselm’s “take me and redeem thyself” to the explicitly sacrificial “offer Me.” Müller then makes a further and very important move. He places that devotional speech “from the altar, after consecration.”
The development can therefore be reconstructed with unusual clarity. Anselm offers a rhetorical analogy and flags it as such: as it were. Alphonsus expands it into devotional sacrificial language: offer Me to the Father. Müller takes that inherited phrase and tells his nineteenth-century Catholic reader that Jesus says it from the consecrated altar. What began as Anselm’s theological personification has become Eucharistic speech.
That source history makes the contrast with Hebrews 7:27 even sharper, not weaker. Hebrews says of Christ, “this he did once, when he offered up himself.” Müller’s Christ says to the worshipper, “offer Me.” The distinction is not a grammatical curiosity but a question of authority. Christ never gives His apostles a command to offer Him to the Father, and the New Testament nowhere places the risen Lord into Christian hands as a propitiatory victim whom they must repeatedly present to God. Nor does Melchizedek provide the missing foundation: Genesis merely says that he “brought forth bread and wine” and blessed Abraham; it never says that he sacrificed that bread and wine, while Hebrews 7 bases Melchizedek’s significance upon his priesthood and his resemblance to the Son of God, not upon an alleged eucharistic oblation. When Hebrews describes Christ’s sacrifice, its language is unequivocal: He “offered up himself,” He entered by “his own blood,” and He was “once offered.” Roman theology may answer that the worshipper participates sacramentally in Christ’s one sacrifice rather than creating another, but that explanation still cannot produce the missing apostolic command “offer Christ to God.” The sacrifices explicitly assigned to Christians after Calvary are of another order: “the sacrifice of praise to God continually” and doing good and communicating, “for with such sacrifices God is well pleased” (Hebrews 13:15–16 KJV). What Müller presents as Christ speaking from the consecrated altar is therefore not a command preserved from Christ or His apostles, but the end product of a demonstrable chain of later devotional development.
There is even a textual warning sign earlier in the chapter which reveals how freely later devotional language is placed over Scripture. Müller quotes Isaiah 53:7 as “He was offered, because it was His own will.” That is the Vulgate/Douay form, oblatus est quia ipse voluit. The KJV reads: “he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter.” The underlying doctrine of Christ’s voluntary self-offering is certainly biblical, as John 10:18 proves, but the precise sentence Müller presents as Isaiah is not how the KJV renders Isaiah 53:7. This matters because Müller repeatedly makes late interpretive language sound like the immediate wording of Scripture.
The same applies when he uses “free among the dead” to describe fetal restriction in Mary’s womb. In the KJV Psalm 88 says, “I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength: Free among the dead” (Psalm 88:4–5). Müller converts that lament into a direct description of the prenatal Jesus and then turns the womb into the model for Eucharistic imprisonment. Scripture itself does not say Psalm 88:5 describes the inability of the unborn Christ to move His hands or feet. Again we see the same method: a biblical phrase is detached from its immediate context, placed inside a later devotional scenario and then carried forward into Eucharistic theology.
The overall pattern of Chapter XIV can now be demonstrated from documents rather than rhetoric. Müller begins with Hebrews, but Hebrews contributes only a relatively small portion of what follows. The first-person dialogue between the Father and Son and the presentation of the scourges, thorns and nails come through Alphonsus Liguori, founder of Müller’s own Redemptorist congregation. Alphonsus is not Scripture; he is an eighteenth-century devotional writer. The claim that Christ suffered continuously from conception and might repeatedly have died from sorrow comes through Alanus de Rupe’s late-medieval revelatory tradition, transmitted posthumously and later edited by Johann Andreas Coppenstein. Parts of that corpus were so historically problematic that the Catholic Bollandists questioned their authorship and condemned gross fabrications in its narratives. The claim that Christ’s sorrow exceeded that of all contrite sinners can genuinely be supported from Thomas Aquinas, but Müller’s larger wording expands far beyond Aquinas, and Aquinas does not teach Müller’s continuing prenatal Mass sacrifice. The line attributed to St Ambrose cannot be verified in Ambrose by the critical editors of Alphonsus and has parallels in a pseudonymous Augustinian sermon collection. The command “take Me, offer Me” develops from an explicitly rhetorical statement in Anselm, through Alphonsus, and is finally placed by Müller upon the lips of Christ speaking from the consecrated altar.
This is why Chapter XIV cannot responsibly be presented as though Müller were merely unfolding the teaching of Hebrews. He is doing something much more complex. He is building a composite devotional theology in which Scripture supplies the foundation stones, later saints supply dramatic expansions, private revelations supply invisible details about Christ’s consciousness, medieval scholastic authority supplies theological prestige, and finally Müller himself makes the decisive Eucharistic application.
The strongest accusation therefore does not need to be that Müller fabricated everything. The evidence is more serious and more interesting than that. Müller frequently did have sources — but the evidential quality of those sources changes drastically while his narrative voice remains confident throughout. An authenticated Pauline text, an Alphonsian meditation, a supposed revelation to Alanus, an authentic but narrower line from Aquinas, an uncertain patristic attribution and an Anselmian rhetorical device are woven together so closely that an ordinary reader could easily assume they all belong to one continuous body of established Christian revelation.
That is particularly dangerous on the central issue of sacrifice, because the argument moves in one direction while Hebrews moves in the other. Müller stretches sacrifice backwards from Calvary to conception: Christ “every moment” endures a “continual sacrifice.” He then stretches it forwards from Calvary into the Mass: Christ “continues” to discharge the penalty there. He then makes the Mass present the prenatal suffering “anew.” Finally he gives the worshipper Christ as an altar-victim to offer to the Father. Hebrews, by contrast, moves relentlessly towards singularity and completion: “once,” “once offered,” “once for all,” “one sacrifice,” “one offering,” “perfected for ever,” “sat down,” “no more offering for sin.”
This distinction cannot be evaded by saying Christ’s entire Incarnate life was meritorious or that He always intended the cross. Those points may be granted without conceding Müller’s argument. Christ could know His Passion from the beginning without every prenatal pain being a penal sacrifice. His whole earthly obedience could be perfectly holy without every moment being a repeated sin-offering. His sacrifice can possess eternal value without needing to “continue” discharging its penalty sacramentally. The risen High Priest can intercede eternally because of His finished sacrifice without becoming again a helpless prisoner whose inability to move is made the theological model of the Eucharist. Hebrews itself makes that distinction: the sacrifice is accomplished, while the Priest lives forever.
The chapter therefore raises three separate questions which Müller effectively blends into one. Did Christ willingly come into the world knowing He would die? Scripture says yes. Did the unborn Christ continuously undergo the penal punishment of every individual future human sin as a sacrificial action from conception? Scripture nowhere says this; Müller’s most specific source is late-medieval private revelation. Are those prenatal sufferings then presented anew to the Father in every Mass so that Christ continues discharging the debt? Again Scripture nowhere says this; that is Müller’s Eucharistic conclusion.
Once those three propositions are separated, the argument loses much of the apparent biblical force Müller gives it. The certainty of the first proposition cannot simply be transferred to the second and third.
And this is ultimately why the chapter is so revealing. Müller’s theology is not built only by quoting a doctrine of the Mass and then defending it. He creates an entire sacred drama around it. Christ in Mary’s womb becomes conscious of every sin, perpetually tortured, imprisoned, a victim and priest from conception. The womb becomes a sacrificial prison. The consecrated Host then becomes another womb and another prison. The resurrected Christ is portrayed as having eyes that cannot see and hands that cannot act. His old sufferings are brought before the Father again. The sinner is invited to lift the divine Infant sacrificially before God like the child in the storm story. Finally Christ Himself is made to say from the altar: “offer Me.”
But when every layer is stripped back to the apostolic testimony, what remains is much simpler and much more final:
“Neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us” (Hebrews 9:12 KJV).
“Nor yet that he should offer himself often” (Hebrews 9:25 KJV).
“Now once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Hebrews 9:26 KJV).
“So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28 KJV).
“By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10 KJV).
“But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God” (Hebrews 10:12 KJV).
“For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14 KJV).
“Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for sin” (Hebrews 10:18 KJV).
That sequence is the apostolic control against which Müller must be tested. The issue is not whether later Catholic writers produced moving meditations, nor whether medieval theologians spoke profoundly about Christ’s love and suffering. The issue is whether those meditations, alleged visions and rhetorical constructions can be elevated into knowledge of what Christ experienced in Mary’s womb and then used to create a continuing sacrificial mechanism in the Mass. Chapter XIV demonstrates that Müller does exactly this. The further the chapter moves from Hebrews, the more detailed its claims become; and paradoxically, the more detailed they become, the less apostolic evidence Müller possesses for them.
The documentary trail therefore exposes not one isolated doubtful quotation but a method. Scripture supplies authority; later devotion supplies details; private revelation supplies secrets; prestigious names supply reassurance; and the Mass becomes the destination to which all those materials are directed. Yet once the sources are separated and restored to their proper evidential rank, the structure becomes visible. Hebrews says Christ offered Himself once. Anselm says, rhetorically, as it were, “take me.” Alphonsus expands the devotional thought into “offer Me.” Müller finally says Christ speaks it “from the altar, after consecration.” Alanian visionary literature says Christ suffered continuously from conception. Müller finally says He “continues to do [so] in every Mass.” The movement is not from apostolic revelation to a necessary conclusion. It is from apostolic revelation through centuries of devotional amplification to a Eucharistic system that is then read back into Scripture.
That is the real forensic conclusion of Chapter XIV: Müller has not shown from Scripture that the Mass renews Christ’s life in Mary’s womb. He has constructed that claim by blending Scripture with later devotional imagination, disputed visionary tradition, scholastic theology and rhetorical speech, and then presenting the resulting synthesis as an account of what Christ continues to do upon the altar. The strongest rebuttal is not an insult to Müller or to Catholic believers. It is simply to separate the sources, date them, read them in context and then return to the text Müller himself invoked. Hebrews does not say “present anew.” It says “once.”
Isaiah 8:20 (KJV) says:
“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”
Christ says this directly in Luke 20:46 (KJV):
“Beware of the scribes, which desire to walk in long robes, and love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts.”
Mark gives the same warning:
“Beware of the scribes, which love to go in long clothing, and love salutations in the marketplaces, And the chief seats in the synagogues, and the uppermost rooms at feasts.” — Mark 12:38–39 KJV
Paul warns in 2 Corinthians 11:13–15:
“For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”
The sources used for this investigation are:
Michael Müller, The Holy Mass: The Sacrifice for the Living and the Dead, fourth revised edition, 1875, especially Chapter XIV, printed pp.181–187. The uploaded copy identifies Müller as a priest of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. holymasssacrific00ml
St Alphonsus Liguori, Redemptorist founder and devotional writer whose meditations provide substantial verbal parallels to Müller’s chapter. Redemptorist biography of St Alphonsus Liguori
Alphonsus, “Jesus Offered Himself for Our Salvation from the Beginning,” containing the “passible body” and satisfaction dialogue reproduced by Müller. Read the Alphonsian meditation
Bibliothèque nationale de France, record for Coppenstein’s 1665 edition of Beati F. Alani redivivi Rupensis tractatus mirabilis de ortu atque progressu psalterii Christi et Mariae. BnF catalogue record for the 1665 Alanus edition
Alanus de Rupe / Coppenstein textual tradition, Part II material containing the alleged revelation of continual suffering from conception. Latin transcription of the Alanian text
Herzog August Bibliothek manuscript catalogue, Cod. ms. Bord. 58A, c.1479, demonstrating early posthumous Alanian manuscript transmission. Kiel Cod. ms. Bord. 58A description
1498 Alanus print tradition, Psalterium Virginis Mariae, Carthusian Monastery of Mariefred. Google Books bibliographical record for the 1498 edition
The Bollandists, Acta Sanctorum, discussion of Alanus de Rupe, containing crassa et manifesta figmenta, imprudentem fabulatorem and the discussion of visible and sensible revelations. Acta Sanctorum discussion of Alanus
Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), “Alanus de Rupe,” noting that Alan’s reported revelations and sermons of St Dominic are not to be regarded as historical. Catholic Encyclopedia article on Alanus de Rupe
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q.46, a.6, authentic source for the narrower proposition concerning the greatness of Christ’s sorrow. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III q.46 a.6
Critical Alphonsian text concerning the alleged Ambrose quotation, which explicitly states that the editors could not locate the text among Ambrose’s works and traces Alphonsus’s immediate source to Liborio Siniscalchi. Critical note in the Alphonsian corpus
Pseudo-Augustinian Sermones suppositii de tempore, where the closely corresponding “O grandis patientia Salvatoris” wording is found in a sermon transmitted under uncertain authorship. Pseudo-Augustinian sermon text
St Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo II.20, containing “tolle me et redime te” followed by the qualifying “Quasi enim hoc dicunt.” Anselm, Cur Deus Homo II.20, Latin critical text
St Alphonsus, The Incarnation, Birth, and Infancy of Jesus Christ, Discourse II, showing how Anselm’s rhetorical language becomes “take Me, offer Me for thyself to the Eternal Father.” Alphonsus, Discourse II
Council of Trent, Session XXII, Chapter II, for the official Catholic distinction between Calvary and the unbloody Eucharistic sacrifice and the claim that the victim is one and the same. Council of Trent, Session XXII
Holy Bible, King James Version, especially Hebrews 7:27; 9:12, 22, 25–28; 10:5–18; Psalm 88:4–5; John 10:18; 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 and Hebrews 13:15–16.
Comments