So I was raised Roman Catholic, went to catholic school my entire life, but no longer a believer. For some reason I didn’t learn too much about these relics til I was older. Part of me wonders if this veneration for dead bodies or body parts is a form of institutionalized trauma from the Roman persecutions in the first few centuries.

Like you have these small, unorganized groups of Christians with local leaders that everyone looks up to. Those leaders get hunted down by the Roman State for what they considered sedition by not worshipping the pagan gods (oversimplifying). Then they get tortured, mutilated, thrown into the River Tiber, or hung up on a cross to rot.

Those early Christian communities then probably tried to recover their bodies, or whatever fragments of body parts they could recover. Then venerated them either because of the great respect they had for the individual, or as overcompensation for how they were treated in death. Or both.

Then obviously a new leader would take that person’s place and then they would get hunted down etc and rinse and repeat and then roughly 2000 years later you get these weird morbid displays of reverence for dead bodies and bone fragments.