Bones, Relics, and the Saints: Is Catholic Veneration Pagan—or Ancient Christianity?
Why Catholics honor the relics of the saints, what the Bible actually says about holy remains, and how early Christian practice compares with Judaism and the pagan world.
A few days ago, a short video titled “Catholic paganism on display!” began circulating on YouTube, showing the relics of St. Agatha of Catania being publicly displayed during a Catholic celebration. Predictably, the clip sent some Protestant anti-Catholic commentators—and more than a few people with only the vaguest understanding of either Catholicism or ancient pagan religion—into a frenzy.
For them, the case was apparently closed at first glance: Catholics were displaying bones, therefore Catholicism must be pagan. Some went further, throwing around words such as idolatry, necromancy, cult, and evil, as though a few seconds of unfamiliar ritual were sufficient to settle nearly two thousand years of Christian history.
You can watch the video here: “Catholic paganism on display!” — YouTube , and a Catholic response video here: Yes, Mike Winger, This is Apostolic
There is a certain irony in confidently accusing an ancient Church of paganism while apparently knowing very little about either ancient Christianity or actual paganism.
Because here is the truth:
Yes, ancient Greeks and Romans honored the dead.
Yes, some pagan cultures preserved the remains of heroes, gathered at tombs, celebrated anniversaries, and believed that the presence of heroic remains could benefit a city or community.
And yes, later Christian devotion to saints sometimes developed external forms that can look surprisingly similar.
Catholics do not need to hide from that history.
But resemblance is not the same thing as identity, and similarity does not prove derivation.
More importantly, the Christian veneration of martyrs and their physical remains did not suddenly appear after Constantine supposedly corrupted Christianity with Roman paganism. We have explicit evidence of Christians preserving martyrs' bones, gathering at their resting places, celebrating their anniversaries, and carefully distinguishing the honor given to martyrs from the worship owed to Christ more than a century and a half before the Council of Nicaea.
And the roots go deeper still.
The Bible itself contains accounts of miracles associated with the bones of prophets and physical objects that had touched the apostles. First-century Judaism preserved human remains with great care. The earliest Christians inherited Jewish beliefs about the resurrection of the body while living inside a Greco-Roman culture already accustomed to tombs, memorials, hero cults, and public commemorations.
So if we are going to accuse Catholicism of paganism, we should at least do the historical homework first.
The real question is not whether a Catholic procession involving the bones of a saint looks strange to a twenty-first-century American Protestant.
The real question is:
What did the first Christians actually believe they were doing?
And when we examine the Bible, first-century Judaism, pagan Greek and Roman practices, and the writings of Christians who lived long before Constantine, the easy accusation of “Catholic paganism” begins to fall apart.
The St. Agatha Controversy
The immediate controversy concerned the August 2026 celebrations in Catania, Sicily, marking the 900th anniversary of the return of the relics of St. Agatha to the city in 1126.
Pope Leo XIV appointed Cardinal Pietro Parolin as his pontifical legate for the celebration. The relics were exposed for public veneration and were present for the pontifical Mass in Piazza Duomo.
To someone unfamiliar with Catholic devotional culture, the sight can admittedly be startling.
There is a skull.
There are bones.
There are ornate reliquaries.
There is incense.
There are processions.
People may bow, kiss a reliquary, or touch devotional objects to it.
And that visual resemblance to certain ancient religious practices is precisely what critics seize upon.
But before shouting “pagan!”, we ought to ask what the Catholic Church actually teaches.
First: What Catholics Mean by “Veneration”
Before discussing bones, skulls, tombs, or paganism, we have to establish one distinction that is absolutely essential to Catholic theology.
Catholics are forbidden to worship saints.
The worship owed to God as God belongs to God alone.
The Catholic tradition normally distinguishes between adoration—traditionally called latria—which belongs to God alone, and veneration or honor given to God's saints.
The Catechism states that Christians are united with those who have died in Christ and that the saints continue to intercede for the Church. It quotes one of the earliest Christian martyr texts:
“We worship Christ as God's Son; we love the martyrs as the Lord's disciples and imitators.”
That sentence is especially important because it did not originate in medieval Catholicism. It comes from the Martyrdom of Polycarp, written in the second century. (vatican.va)
Catholic doctrine therefore does not claim:
“St. Agatha's bones are divine.”
It does not teach:
“This skull possesses magical power independent of God.”
Nor does it teach:
“We sacrifice to St. Agatha as a goddess.”
The Church instead understands the body of a saint as the former earthly temple of the Holy Spirit, destined for resurrection, and intimately connected with a person whom God sanctified.
The Vatican's 2017 instruction on relics explicitly warns that relics must be honored while avoiding superstition and illicit commerce. (press.vatican.va)
That qualification matters. Catholic theology itself recognizes that authentic devotion can be distorted into superstition.
What Exactly Is a Relic?
Traditionally Catholics speak of several kinds of relics.
A first-class relic is part of the saint's physical remains: bone, hair, blood, ashes, or another part of the body.
A second-class relic is something personally used or worn by the saint.
A contact relic, sometimes called a third-class relic in popular Catholic terminology, is an object that has been touched to a saint's remains or shrine.
The Church does not teach that these objects function like magical batteries.
The theological idea is instead deeply incarnational:
God works through material creation.
Christianity is, after all, built around some astonishingly material claims:
God became flesh.
Jesus healed with touch.
Christ used mud to heal a blind man's eyes.
Water is used in baptism.
Bread and wine become central to the Eucharistic mystery.
Oil is used for anointing.
Hands are laid upon people.
And, most importantly, Christians believe that the human body itself will someday be resurrected.
From that perspective, honoring the physical remains of a saint is not based upon hatred of the body but almost its opposite.
The body matters because God created it, sanctified it, and intends to raise it.
The Most Striking Biblical Example: The Bones of Elisha
If the Bible taught that nothing supernatural could ever occur in connection with the remains of a holy person, there would be one extraordinarily difficult passage to explain.
After the prophet Elisha died, Scripture tells us that another dead man was accidentally thrown into Elisha's grave:
“When the man touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood on his feet.”
— 2 Kings 13:21
This is about as literal an example of a holy man's bones being associated with a miracle as one could imagine.
Catholics should nevertheless avoid exaggerating the passage.
It does not say Israelites established a shrine and began praying to Elisha's bones.
It does not establish every later Catholic relic practice.
But it destroys the stronger claim sometimes made in polemics that the very idea of God's power operating in association with the remains of a holy person is necessarily pagan or unbiblical.
According to the biblical narrative, God himself performed a miracle when a corpse touched the bones of his prophet.
What About the New Testament?
The New Testament contains another practice remarkably close to what Catholics would later call contact relics.
Acts tells us:
“God did extraordinary miracles through Paul,”
to such a degree that handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul's body were carried to the sick, and people were healed and delivered from evil spirits.
— Acts 19:11–12 (biblegateway.com)
Notice where Acts puts the power:
God did the miracles.
Paul's apron was not a magical talisman.
That is almost precisely the distinction Catholic theology makes concerning relics.
Something connected physically with a holy person becomes an occasion through which God, not the object itself, acts.
Acts 5:15 contains a related tradition concerning people hoping that even Peter's shadow might fall upon the sick.
Once again, this does not prove every Catholic custom that developed centuries later.
It does demonstrate, however, that biblical Christianity was not uncomfortable with the idea that God's grace could be manifested through bodily contact and material things connected with the apostles.
And Then There Is Joseph's Body
The Old Testament also shows remarkable reverence for the physical remains of the righteous.
Joseph, dying in Egypt, commanded the Israelites eventually to carry his bones back to the Promised Land.
Exodus records that Moses did precisely that.
The bones of Joseph therefore accompanied Israel during the Exodus.
Again, they were not worshiped.
But neither were they dismissed as a meaningless shell that could simply be discarded.
The physical remains of a holy ancestor mattered because they were connected with the identity, covenant, and memory of God's people.
But Didn't Judaism Consider Corpses Unclean?
Yes.
And this is one of the strongest arguments that must be considered when discussing the Jewish background.
According to Numbers 19, touching a dead body rendered an Israelite ceremonially unclean.
That is important because it demonstrates that ancient Israel did not possess an uncomplicated “relic cult” corresponding directly to later Catholic practice.
Jewish attitudes toward human remains combined profound reverence for the dead with ritual restrictions concerning corpse impurity.
Yet ceremonial impurity did not mean that dead bodies were evil.
Jews buried their dead carefully and preserved their remains.
Indeed, archaeology gives us striking evidence from the period immediately surrounding the life of Jesus.
During the late Second Temple period, especially around Jerusalem, Jewish families sometimes practiced secondary burial. After decomposition, the bones of the deceased could be gathered and placed in stone boxes called ossuaries.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that this practice flourished around Jerusalem from approximately the late first century BC through the first century AD. (resources.metmuseum.org)
The famous Caiaphas ossuary provides another archaeological example from this cultural world. (imj.org.il)
Thus the first Christians arose within a Jewish culture that simultaneously:
respected and preserved human remains,
maintained family tombs,
sometimes gathered bones after decomposition,
remembered righteous ancestors,
regarded corpse contact as ritually defiling,
and possessed Scripture containing the extraordinary miracle involving Elisha's bones.
That is a much more complex background than simply saying, “Jews wanted nothing to do with bones.”
Jewish Prayer for the Dead
Catholic Bibles also contain 2 Maccabees 12, where Judas Maccabeus makes provision for an offering on behalf of fallen Jewish soldiers.
Catholics traditionally cite this passage primarily in relation to prayer for the dead and purgatory.
Protestants do not generally accept 2 Maccabees as canonical Scripture, so it cannot by itself settle a Catholic-Protestant debate.
Historically, however, it remains extremely important.
Whether one regards the book as inspired Scripture or merely ancient Jewish literature, it proves that pre-Christian Jews could engage in religious acts on behalf of the dead.
Christian concern for departed believers therefore cannot simply be attributed to the conversion of pagan Romans centuries later.
The Crucial Pre-Nicene Evidence: St. Polycarp
Now we reach perhaps the most important historical evidence of all.
The Council of Nicaea occurred in AD 325.
Some critics of Catholicism argue that practices such as venerating martyrs and their relics appeared only after Constantine supposedly paganized Christianity.
The historical record makes that theory extraordinarily difficult to sustain.
Consider St. Polycarp of Smyrna.
Polycarp was an early Christian bishop traditionally connected with the apostolic generation. He was executed in the second century, probably around AD 155–156.
Shortly after his martyrdom, the Christians of Smyrna wrote an account describing what happened to his body.
They specifically denied that honoring Polycarp meant replacing Christ with Polycarp.
The text says:
“We worship Him who is the Son of God, but the martyrs…we love.”
Then comes the remarkable description of Polycarp's remains.
After his body had been burned, the Christians gathered his bones, describing them as more valuable than precious stones, and deposited them in a suitable place.
They then explained why.
They hoped to gather there again to celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom, both to remember previous martyrs and to prepare Christians for similar faithfulness.
Consider what we have here.
This is roughly 170 years before Nicaea.
It contains:
the preservation of a martyr's bones;
special honor given to those bones;
a designated place where they were kept;
Christians assembling there;
and
an annual liturgical commemoration of the martyr.
It is difficult to maintain that Christian reverence for martyrs' remains originated with Constantine when we possess this evidence from the second century.
Tertullian: Christian Memorials Before Nicaea
Around the beginning of the third century, the North African Christian writer Tertullian described several Christian customs that he believed were preserved through tradition.
Among them he mentions annual offerings made for the dead on their anniversaries. (newadvent.org)
This does not prove every later practice involving saints' relics.
But it confirms something important:
Christians were already maintaining liturgical commemorations of departed believers well before Constantine.
Even more interestingly, Tertullian was fiercely opposed to pagan religion.
He condemned idolatrous funeral rites and pagan religious spectacles. (newadvent.org)
This matters because it demonstrates that early Christians were not simply unaware that pagan society also honored the dead.
They knew it.
They rejected what they understood to be pagan worship.
Yet they continued their own Christian commemorations of the departed.
St. Cyprian: Keep Track of the Martyrs' Death Days
An even clearer witness comes from St. Cyprian of Carthage, who died as a martyr in AD 258.
Writing during persecution, Cyprian instructed Christians to record the dates on which imprisoned believers died:
“take note of their days on which they depart”
so that their commemorations could be celebrated among the memorials of the martyrs.
He also refers to offerings and Eucharistic celebrations connected with those commemorations. (newadvent.org)
Again:
AD 258.
That is approximately 67 years before Nicaea.
There was already a recognizable Christian calendar of martyr commemorations.
Peter and Paul: Visiting the Apostolic Memorials Around AD 200
Another fascinating piece of evidence comes from a Roman Christian named Gaius, or Caius, writing around AD 200.
His words survive because the fourth-century historian Eusebius quoted them.
Gaius challenged an opponent:
“I can show the trophies of the apostles.”
He then directed him to the Vatican and the Ostian Way, where memorials associated with Peter and Paul could be found. (newadvent.org)
Exactly what tropaia—“trophies”—meant in every architectural detail is debated.
But the evidence demonstrates that around AD 200 Christians in Rome identified specific physical locations associated with the deaths or burials of Peter and Paul.
The modern excavations beneath St. Peter's Basilica have made this testimony even more historically interesting.
Whatever conclusions one reaches concerning particular bones attributed to Peter, devotion centered upon Peter's Vatican burial site is not a medieval invention.
Its roots reach far back into pre-Constantinian Christianity. (osservatoreromano.va)
So Was the Entire Modern Catholic Relic System Already Present in AD 150?
No.
And Catholics should be willing to say so.
Historical development is real.
The Christians who gathered Polycarp's bones were not operating a medieval reliquary treasury.
The enormous translation of relics between cities, subdivision of relics, elaborate reliquaries, relic pilgrimages spanning continents, and some of the miraculous traditions associated with relics became much more prominent during late antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Historian Robert Wiśniewski, in his major Oxford study The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics, emphasizes precisely this development. Practices involving touching, moving, discovering, distributing, and attributing protective functions to relics expanded substantially during late antiquity. (academic.oup.com)
That does not mean there was no earlier foundation.
Rather, the evidence suggests a progression:
memory of martyrs → honor at their graves → preservation of their remains → liturgical anniversaries → pilgrimage and shrine culture → broader circulation and division of relics.
Development is not the same thing as invention.
The Eucharistic liturgy itself developed in its ceremonial forms.
Church architecture developed.
The biblical canon was formally clarified over time.
Christian vocabulary concerning the Trinity developed.
The relevant question is therefore not:
“Did third-century Christians use a seventeenth-century reliquary?”
Obviously they did not.
The better question is:
Can we see the theological and devotional roots of relic veneration before Constantine?
The answer is clearly yes.
But What About the Pagans?
This is where Catholics should resist overly simplistic apologetics.
Ancient Greeks absolutely did honor deceased heroes at tombs.
Greek hero cults existed centuries before Christianity.
Heroes—sometimes mythological, sometimes believed to have been historical—could receive ritual honor after death.
Their tombs could become religious centers.
Offerings could be made.
Annual commemorations could occur.
Communities sometimes believed possession of a hero's remains brought protection or prestige.
Archaeological and classical scholarship has documented the importance of tomb cult and hero cult throughout ancient Greece. (journals.uchicago.edu)
There are therefore undeniable outward similarities with later Christian saint devotion.
They can include:
a revered dead person;
a tomb or shrine;
annual commemorations;
pilgrimage;
physical remains;
the belief that a deceased holy or heroic figure remained somehow relevant to the community.
To say that there is “absolutely no resemblance whatsoever” would not be historically serious.
Did Greeks Actually Value Heroes' Bones?
Yes.
Ancient traditions even tell stories about cities acquiring the bones of heroes.
The alleged remains of figures such as Orestes and Theseus could become politically and religiously important.
A hero's tomb could function as a focal point for civic identity and supernatural protection.
This helps explain why a modern observer familiar with classical religion might look at a Christian procession carrying a saint's bones and say:
“That looks like Greek hero cult.”
At the level of outward religious behavior, sometimes it does.
The real dispute concerns why Christians did it and what they believed they were doing.
Does Similarity Prove Borrowing?
No.
Similarity establishes a question, not an answer.
Human beings across radically different cultures bury honored leaders, preserve ancestral remains, build memorials, visit graves, celebrate anniversaries, and keep objects associated with beloved people.
The United States preserves the clothing, furniture, letters, houses, and burial places of famous Americans without believing that Abraham Lincoln is a god.
Families preserve wedding rings and photographs.
People visit Arlington National Cemetery.
We build monuments over the graves of soldiers.
None of those examples is identical to Catholic relic veneration, but they demonstrate an important principle:
similar external actions do not necessarily possess identical theological meanings.
The same is true in antiquity.
A pagan might burn incense before an emperor because he believed the emperor possessed divine status.
A Christian might burn incense near the tomb of a martyr while believing that the martyr was a creature entirely dependent upon the one God.
The physical gesture alone cannot tell us the theology behind it.
Could Christianity Have Adopted Some Cultural Forms From Pagan Society?
Here the historically responsible answer is:
Quite possibly.
Christianity did not develop in a cultural vacuum.
Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking Christians lived inside the Greco-Roman world.
They spoke Greek and Latin.
They used Roman roads.
They adopted architectural forms.
They used philosophical terminology.
They participated in ordinary funeral customs.
It would therefore be surprising if Christian modes of commemorating their dead showed absolutely no influence from surrounding cultures.
Even older Catholic scholarship sometimes acknowledged possible parallels between Christian martyr anniversaries and Greco-Roman commemorations of the dead. (newadvent.org)
Modern scholarship likewise studies the interaction between Christian relic practices and the broader religious culture of late antiquity.
But interaction does not necessarily mean wholesale derivation.
Wiśniewski, for example, finds meaningful interaction between Christian and non-Christian practices while cautioning against simply explaining Christian beliefs as direct copies of pagan ones. (academic.oup.com)
That is probably the most historically balanced position.
Christianity inherited ideas from Judaism, developed beliefs grounded in Christ and resurrection theology, and expressed those beliefs within a Greco-Roman cultural environment.
All three factors matter.
Christianity Itself Admits That Paganism Influenced Certain Customs
Catholics do not need to believe that every external Christian custom dropped directly from heaven.
The Church has often Christianized cultural practices.
Dates, architectural forms, artistic styles, processions, philosophical vocabulary, and local customs can be adopted and given a new meaning.
The theological question is not simply:
“Did pagans ever do something that looked like this?”
If that were the standard, Christians could hardly light candles, sing hymns, use incense, build temples or churches, hold religious processions, kneel, sacrifice money, wear religious clothing, celebrate feast days, or bury their dead ceremonially—because pagan religions did all of those things.
The real question is:
Does Christianity preserve the pagan theology behind the practice?
In the case of saints, Catholicism says no.
The Resurrection Changes Everything
One of the deepest differences between Christian relic theology and much of classical pagan religion is the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body.
A saint's body is not regarded merely as the abandoned shell of a soul.
St. Paul teaches that the body will be raised.
Christian baptism sanctifies the body.
The Eucharist is received bodily.
The Holy Spirit dwells in Christians.
Martyrs surrendered their bodies to torture rather than deny Christ.
Their bones consequently became physical testimony to their confession of faith.
The Vatican's current instruction explains relic veneration in precisely this resurrection-centered way: the body of a saint was a temple of the Holy Spirit and is destined for resurrection. (vatican.va)
That is distinctly Christian theology.
Why Are Relics Connected With Catholic Altars?
The relationship between relics and Mass is particularly significant.
The present General Instruction of the Roman Missal says:
“The practice of placing relics of Saints, even those not Martyrs, under the altar to be dedicated is fittingly retained.”
The Church also permits relics of saints exposed for public veneration to be incensed at the beginning of Mass. (vatican.va)
Why?
The symbolism ultimately connects the sacrifice of the martyrs with the sacrifice of Christ.
The martyrs did not replace Jesus.
They died because of Jesus.
Their death was understood as participation in his victory.
This is already visible in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, whose author carefully insists that Christ alone is worshiped while the martyrs are loved as disciples of Christ.
Thus placing a martyr's relic near an altar does not mean:
“We sacrifice to this dead saint.”
It means almost exactly the opposite:
This Christian gave everything because he or she believed in the sacrifice being celebrated here.
Is Talking to Saints Necromancy?
This accusation deserves separate treatment.
The Bible clearly condemns necromancy.
Israel was forbidden to attempt to conjure the dead in order to obtain secret knowledge or supernatural power.
The classic example is Saul consulting the medium at Endor.
Catholicism accepts those prohibitions.
But asking a saint to pray is theologically different from attempting to summon a spirit.
Catholics do not attempt to cause St. Peter, St. Agatha, or Mary to materialize.
They do not ask saints to reveal tomorrow's lottery numbers.
They do not attempt to control spirits through occult rituals.
They ask:
“Pray for us.”
The underlying Catholic argument is that Christians who die in Christ remain members of Christ's body.
The Catechism summarizes this as the communion of saints, teaching that death does not destroy the communion existing among Christians. (vatican.va)
Whether Scripture proves that Christians should directly invoke saints is a legitimate Catholic-Protestant debate.
But simply labeling the practice “necromancy” assumes the very thing being debated.
What About “There Is One Mediator Between God and Man”?
Protestants frequently cite 1 Timothy 2:5:
“There is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.”
Catholics believe that verse completely.
Christ is the unique mediator of salvation.
No saint died to redeem humanity.
No saint reconciles humanity to the Father independently of Christ.
But immediately before Paul's declaration about the one mediator, he urges Christians to offer “supplications, prayers, intercessions” for everyone.
Human intercession therefore does not compete with Christ's unique mediation.
When I ask another Christian:
“Please pray for me,”
I have not created another redeemer.
Catholic theology applies the same principle to Christians who are already with Christ.
A Protestant may reasonably respond that Scripture never explicitly commands Christians on earth to address departed saints.
That is a genuine point of disagreement.
But it is a different argument from claiming that Catholics believe Mary or the saints replace Christ.
They do not.
The Strongest Protestant Objection
A thoughtful Protestant critique does not need to pretend that Polycarp never existed or that 2 Kings never mentions Elisha's bones.
A stronger objection would be:
Yes, Scripture contains miraculous contact with sacred persons and objects, and yes, early Christians honored martyrs. But those isolated examples do not authorize the elaborate invocation, kissing, incensing, procession, subdivision, and public display of human relics found in later Catholicism.
That objection deserves to be taken seriously.
There is a genuine historical development between the New Testament period and medieval Catholic relic culture.
There were also abuses.
Relics were sometimes fraudulently identified.
Commercialization occurred.
Superstitious ideas sometimes attached themselves to particular shrines.
Even Catholic authorities have repeatedly attempted to regulate such abuses.
Canon law today absolutely forbids the sale of sacred relics, and Vatican regulations require ecclesiastical authentication before relics are exposed for public veneration. (vatican.va)
Catholics therefore do not need to defend every relic ever advertised in Christian history.
Authenticity is a historical question.
Proper veneration is a theological question.
Abuse is a pastoral question.
They should not be confused.
The Strongest Catholic Response
The Catholic answer is cumulative rather than dependent upon one proof text.
Catholics see a biblical and historical pattern:
Joseph's bones are preserved and carried with Israel.
Elisha's bones become the occasion of a resurrection miracle.
Objects touching Paul's body become instruments through which God heals.
The earliest Christians carefully preserve the remains of their martyrs.
Second-century Christians gather around Polycarp's remains and commemorate his martyrdom.
By around AD 200 Christians identify memorials associated with Peter and Paul in Rome.
Tertullian describes annual Christian commemorations of the departed.
Cyprian records annual Eucharistic commemorations of martyrs before AD 258.
All of this predates Constantine and Nicaea.
Consequently, the theory that Constantine or the fourth-century Roman state simply imported pagan hero worship into Christianity cannot explain the evidence.
The chronology is wrong.
Were the Early Christians Secretly Reintroducing Paganism?
There is another difficulty with that theory.
The Christians who preserved Polycarp's bones were themselves persecuted by pagan authorities.
They were not attempting to make Christianity more acceptable to Roman religion.
And their document explicitly distinguishes Christian devotion from worship:
Christ is worshiped; martyrs are loved and honored.
Likewise, writers such as Tertullian were ferocious critics of pagan idolatry.
Early Christians were quite capable of recognizing pagan religious practices and rejecting them.
It is therefore historically implausible to assume that whenever a Christian practice resembles a pagan one, early Christians must simply have forgotten their opposition to pagan worship.
More likely, Christians took universal human behaviors—burying the dead, honoring heroes, keeping anniversaries, visiting tombs—and interpreted them through a radically different theological framework:
Christ's Resurrection.
But Pagans Really Did Have Hero Cults
None of that requires Catholics to deny the resemblance.
Greek religion provides perhaps the strongest parallel.
Scholars describe hero cult as organized religious honor directed toward extraordinary deceased figures, often centered upon a tomb or sacred location. (journals.uchicago.edu)
A city's possession of a hero's remains could acquire civic importance.
Later Christian cities could similarly identify themselves with patron saints and their relics.
That parallel is real.
A historian is entirely justified in investigating whether pagan forms influenced Christian expression.
Where the argument becomes too simplistic is when resemblance is treated as proof of theological identity.
A Christian praying near St. Peter's tomb and an Athenian making sacrifice to a hero may occupy superficially comparable sacred spaces while believing fundamentally different things about God, death, sacrifice, resurrection, and the person being honored.
Christianity Was Neither Purely Jewish nor Secretly Pagan
Perhaps the most accurate historical picture is that Christianity emerged from Judaism within the Greco-Roman world.
That means both backgrounds matter.
From Judaism Christianity inherited:
the God of Abraham;
the Hebrew Scriptures;
prophets and patriarchs;
reverence for the righteous dead;
the carrying of Joseph's bones;
the miraculous story of Elisha's bones;
Jewish burial traditions;
and belief in bodily resurrection, especially within certain Jewish movements.
From its Greco-Roman environment Christianity encountered:
hero cults;
memorial festivals;
processions;
incense;
shrines;
funerary associations;
pilgrimages;
and elaborate ways of honoring distinguished dead persons.
Christianity then reorganized these things around its central proclamation:
Jesus Christ has risen from the dead.
The saint was not another god.
The saint was evidence of what Christ could do to a human being.
The martyr's tomb was not the grave of a demigod.
It was the resting place of someone awaiting resurrection.
Why Bones?
This brings us back to the disturbing image of a human skull.
Why not simply remember the saint spiritually?
Because Christianity does not teach salvation from the body.
It teaches salvation of the body.
The bones of St. Agatha are disturbing precisely because death is disturbing.
They confront us with mortality.
Catholicism does something modern Western culture often avoids: it places death visibly before us.
A skull says:
Agatha died.
Christian faith adds:
Agatha will rise.
In this sense a relic is almost an anti-death symbol.
Its message is not:
“Look at the power of death.”
Its message is:
“Death did not get the final word.”
And That Is What Was Happening in Catania
The Vatican's own description of the 2026 celebrations makes this theology clear.
Pope Leo XIV described St. Agatha's martyrdom as a manifestation of the victory of grace over violence, faith over fear, and charity over death. (press.vatican.va)
Cardinal Parolin similarly emphasized that Agatha's significance came from her communion with Christ. (vaticannews.va)
One can certainly dislike the visual presentation.
One can find the display of a skull culturally jarring.
A Catholic can even wonder whether a particular devotional ceremony communicates Christian theology effectively to modern observers.
Those are fair questions.
But none of them proves pagan worship.
My Catholic Conclusion
As a Catholic, I believe the historic Christian practice of venerating saints and their relics is defensible from Scripture, Tradition, and the theology of the Resurrection.
But I also think Catholics weaken their argument when we pretend there are no parallels with pagan religion or that every later relic custom existed unchanged in the first century.
They did not.
There were Greek and Roman hero cults.
There were ancient religious practices centered upon tombs and heroic remains.
Christian relic devotion did develop over time.
Some cultural borrowing or adaptation is entirely plausible.
And abuses unquestionably occurred.
None of that establishes that the theology itself is pagan.
The decisive evidence is that reverence for Christian martyrs and their bodily remains appears long before Constantine, while the Church was still persecuted and while Christian writers explicitly rejected pagan worship.
The Christians of Smyrna did not believe Polycarp was another god.
They said precisely the opposite.
They worshiped Christ.
They loved Polycarp because he belonged to Christ.
And then they gathered his bones.
That was roughly AD 155.
Nicaea would not meet for another 170 years.
So when someone points to the bones of St. Agatha and announces:
“This proves Catholicism is pagan,”
the historically responsible response is not to become defensive.
It is to ask:
Have we actually examined the Bible, Judaism, Greek and Roman religion, and the writings of the Christians who lived before Constantine?
Once we do, the picture becomes considerably more complicated.
Catholic devotion to relics certainly developed within the ancient Mediterranean world, and some of its external forms resemble practices that existed before Christianity.
But its theological foundation—Christ's incarnation, the sanctification of the human body, the communion of saints, martyrdom, and the resurrection of the flesh—is unmistakably Christian.
The bones are not God.
The saint is not God.
The reliquary is not God.
God alone is worshiped.
The relic simply points beyond itself to what Catholics believe God has already accomplished in one of His children—and what He promises eventually to accomplish in all who belong to Christ:
“I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”
That is ultimately why Catholics keep the bones.
Sources and Further Reading
The 2026 St. Agatha controversy and celebration
YouTube — “Catholic paganism on display!”
Watch the short
Holy See Press Office — Letter of Pope Leo XIV concerning the ninth centenary of the return of St. Agatha's relics to Catania
Read the Vatican document
Vatican News — “Cardinal Parolin in Sicily: Saint Agatha's witness still speaks to the Church”
Read Vatican News
Archdiocese of Catania — official diocesan coverage and schedule of the Agatha Jubilee celebrations
Visit the Archdiocese of Catania
For an example of the hostile interpretation circulating online, see the article describing the ceremony as “necromancy.” Its language is polemical, but it is useful for understanding the criticism being answered here. (disntr.com)
Scripture
2 Kings 13:21 — the miracle associated with Elisha's bones
Read 2 Kings 13:21
Acts 19:11–12 — objects touching Paul's body carried to the sick
Read Acts 19:11–12
Pre-Nicene Christianity
The Martyrdom of Polycarp, especially chapters 17–18 — one of the clearest second-century witnesses to the distinction between worship of Christ and honor shown to martyrs, as well as the preservation of Polycarp's bones.
Read the Martyrdom of Polycarp
Eusebius, Church History, Book IV — preserves the Polycarp account and its explicit distinction between worship of Christ and love of the martyrs.
Read Eusebius, Book IV
Tertullian, De Corona, chapter 3 — refers to annual Christian offerings and commemorations for the dead.
Read Tertullian's De Corona
St. Cyprian of Carthage, Epistle 36 — instructs Christians to record martyrs' death dates for liturgical commemoration.
Read Cyprian, Epistle 36
Gaius of Rome, Fragments — the approximately AD 200 reference to the “trophies” of Peter and Paul at the Vatican and Ostian Road.
Read the surviving fragments of Gaius
Eusebius, Church History, Book II, chapter 25 — preserves Gaius's testimony concerning Peter and Paul.
Read Eusebius, Book II
Catholic doctrine and present Church discipline
Catechism of the Catholic Church §§954–962 — Communion of Saints
Read the Catechism on the Communion of Saints
Catechism §§1674–1676 — relics and popular piety
Read the Catechism on relics and popular devotion
General Instruction of the Roman Missal §§277, 302 — relics at Mass and beneath altars
Read the General Instruction of the Roman Missal
Congregation for the Causes of Saints — Relics in the Church: Authenticity and Preservation (2017)
Read the Vatican instruction on relics
Code of Canon Law, Canons 1186–1190 — governing saints, sacred images, relics, and prohibiting the sale of relics.
Read Canons 1186–1190
First-century Judaism and archaeology
Metropolitan Museum of Art — First-century Judean ossuary and the practice of secondary bone burial
View the Met's Judean ossuary
Israel Museum — Ossuary of Caiaphas
View the Caiaphas ossuary
Greek hero cult and pagan parallels
Carla M. Antonaccio, “Contesting the Past: Hero Cult, Tomb Cult, and Epic in Early Greece,” American Journal of Archaeology — scholarly discussion of Greek hero and tomb cult. (journals.uchicago.edu)
Gunnel Ekroth, “Heroes—Living or Dead?” in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion — overview of Greek hero cults, cult locations, and ritual practices.
View the Oxford Academic entry
Robert Wiśniewski, The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics, Oxford University Press — especially valuable because it treats Christian relic practices historically rather than assuming either complete pagan derivation or complete cultural isolation.
Explore The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics
Robert Wiśniewski, “Touching Relics” — discussion of how physical contact with saints' remains developed within early Christianity.
Read the Oxford chapter overview
Catechism Q&A — The Catholic Answer in One Sentence
Q: Why do Catholics venerate the relics and bones of saints if worship belongs to God alone?
A: Catholics do not worship relics or saints; they honor the bodily remains of holy men and women as members of Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit, and future participants in the resurrection, while giving adoration to God alone.** (Catechism of the Catholic Church §§956–957, 1674)
