actually, though most people know this already, the catholic church has a very long and venerable history of mucking about in the coffins of the deceased. It is far from a novelty to find them conducting pious exhumations to more auspicious sites. During the central Middle Ages the cult of saints' relics was at its height, and you were quite simply nobody if you didn't have at least two pieces of the true cross, half a pint of christ's blood and a head of John the Baptist to your name. Many, many saints' corpses were exhumed and re-buried (when they weren't broken up for tourist trinkets), and even the bones of regular people were collected up from the churchyards at regular intervals, and reinterred in the Charnel House with great reverence. Certain peoples in Eastern Europe even built great churches and cathedral interiors from the bones of the dead, such as the macabre Sedlec Ossuary in Prague.

Of course, the rest of European society has moved on from this kind of primitive necromancy and superstitious focal magic in the intervening centuries...