Yeah the protestants think the saint stuff is absurd and even creepy when you get into the relics. I'm not sure where it came from but I'm guessing some weird roman religion origin.

There's no reason the Catholics couldn't have invented it independently. I think that's just the human instinctive approach to religion. Lots of little per-concept semi-spiritual entities, sacred and profane objects, etc.

It could be an independent thing but it just reeks of that culture practice used in roman and egyptian times of elevating some great man e.g. emperor to the status of a god and having them be worshipped as such after death, and makes sense in terms of continuity that it might have just been adopted over inventing the same concept in the same part of the world around the same time but somehow having this be a purely independent invention. Society was already socialized for this sort of thing and support the political control of their own leadership through deep cultural ties like making them a seemingly unassailable part of the religion or some unstoppable force of nature.

Religious groups other than Catholics with few plausible connections to ancient Rome have independently conceived the idea of the importance of things like relics (e.g Buddhism), but it's called the Roman Catholic Church for a reason...

Of course the buddhist and the classical world were not so separated as people assumed, there was a period of cultural exchange after the conquests of Alexander and resulting greco-buddhist rump states.

> Tell them saints are just minor gods of the Christian pantheon

That’s the whole idea though:

“God became man so that men might become gods,” -St. Athanasius

Good reply! St Peter's words about "becom[ing] partakers of the Divine Nature" are intended literally.

Thank you both for the interesting rabbit hole:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divinization_(Christian)

Tolkien, who was a devout Catholic and who wanted his religion in LOTR to not contradict his own, literally had minor gods (the Valar). He squared that with his Catholicism because he had them subordinate to Ilúvatar (God), much like how saints and angels are.