Doubtless people have glimpsed this news in the headines.
Not surprisingly, atheists and most other Christians besides Orthodox and Catholics are condescending about the veneration of relics or presumed relics. This attitude is reflected in the NYT's story on the arrival in Rome of the 2 Italian Capuchins monastics who, the paper says disparagingly in its title for the article, are "long-deceased".
Seeing that description, I thought of early Christians, imagining St Agatha or St Cecilia, and opened the article to see which famous Saints of the Early Church might be the center of the festivities.
But Padre Pio died in 1968, barely a few decades ago. 2 years after St John Maximovitch. I had to roll my eyes at the obvious putdown.
The end remark of this paragraph struck a chord of repulsion, however.
"Robert Mickens, a longtime Vatican analyst, said venerating saints or praying at the tombs of martyrs is a time-honored Catholic practice, but he questioned the decision to display the remains of the two saints. “What I find so distasteful, wrongheaded and sort of bizarre is parading these things under glass boxes,” said Mr. Mickens, the editor of Global Pulse magazine. “This is like Lenin’s Tomb, for God’s sake.” "