• In Germany there is an old pilgrimage church in Walldürn which was said to be great for women suffering from infertility. But when doing a pilgrimage to there didn't suffice, then some couples took it a step further and got all rutty as close to the church as possible, as having sex in Walldürn was believed to always end in a pregnancy
  
• In the Bavarian town of Ebersberg, every year the local priest would move the skullcap of St Sebastian out of the reliquary, fill it with wine and let the parishioners drink from it. This was actually far from the only instance where people drank blessed wine from holy relics
  
• Children died a lot back in those days, sometimes before they were able to be baptised. This was a terrible thought for the poor parents, as most believed that death without baptism would forever preclude the child's soul from going to heaven. This is why popular folk religion came up with the idea of "Limbo", i.e. a space adjacent to heaven where existence was free from pain and full of joy instead, even though it was technically speaking not heaven itself (the Church never officially endorsed this idea, and a couple of years ago Pope Benedict stated that there was no Limbo and that unbaptised children simply go to heaven instead). But while Limbo is good, heaven is even better, and so a lot of desperate parents would carry their dead children to special pilgrimage churches, sometimes over distances of several hundred kilometers, place them on the altar there. The belief was that this would make the children come back to life again for a short moment (in reality this was probably stuff like the cheeks looking kinda rosy again in the candlelight, or simply wishful thinking), enough to be baptised. Ursberg in southern Germany saw thousands of those very peculiar pilgrimages every year.
  
• Confraternities were basically "eternal life insurances", i.e. membership in one conferred its various religious privileges and indulgences onto you. But you really want to make sure that you go to heaven, so why stop at one confraternity? Many (if not most) Catholics were members in at least one confraternity, often even more than that. Just don't overdo it like Anselmina von Bodman, a nun from Augsburg who was a member of at least 24 confraternities who all had to be considered in her will.
  
• The Church says that only humans get to be saints. But who cares, dogs are cool too! Indeed, in the Dombes in eastern France, the local peasantry venerated a dead dog named St Guinefort for centuries despite the Church trying its damndest to stamp out this particular practice. The pilgrimage to what was considered to be Guinefort's grave continued all the way until the 1930s, even!
  
• A feature of Catholicism that is still practiced today is that you can arrange for Masses to be read on behalf of a dead friend or relative; this is supposed to ease the departed soul's way into heaven. Early modern Catholics loved ordering Masses too, so much indeed that even the huge number of priests of that time had trouble keeping up with the truly enormous number of Masses they were supposed to read. In the cathedral of Sevilla, every day 500 Masses were celebrated on 80 altars; in Vienna's St Stephen's cathedral 39 altars had 200 Masses read on them per day etc. Sometimes the workload got so immense that huge backlogs developed. A Bavarian priest of the 18th century was reported to have fallen behind by 1,500 Masses, and the backlog of the popular pilgrimage site in Loreto temporarily rose to 75,000 Masses waiting to be read. Peter Hersche estimates that during its peak up to 100 million Masses might have been read throughout Europe every year.
  
• This huge number of Masses also meant that there was a ton of priests drawing their salaray from them. St Peter's church in Vienna - neither a pilgrimage site nor a parish church, mind! - employed seven collegiate priests, four deacons, four subdeacons, five confessional priests, 25 "freelance" priests as well as Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustines, Pazmanites and finally a number of Croatians caring for the Croatian community in Vienna. But it wasn't only priests that were plentiful, but other clergy too: In the pretty rural area around Aichach in Bavaria, about one percent of the population was clergy. At the same time only the monks and nuns of the many monasteries in Vienna made up about 1.2% of the city's total population! In some Italian cities clergy might have constituted up to ten percent of the population, and in early 17th century Florence there were more nuns than married women.
  
• Catholics had a huge number of blessings, sacramentals and other things that are sometimes called "clerical semi-magic". Those were especially popular amongst rural folk who were hugely dependent on the health of their livestock or what the next harvest would look like. Protestant farmers didn't have the same options, and therefore we know that even though religious conflict was at a constant high during that period, many of Protestants would regularly sneak away into neighbouring Catholic areas in order to get some of those blessings for themselves and their farms too.
  

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