[jvanderbot]

That's neat! However, if each burger king was so enshrined by king burger, then there would again be nothing interesting. So, were these the only sites that were selected in that way?

Second, is this a post-hoc story we told about the shrines (perhaps to avoid destruction / re-purposing by a greedy local lord?)

[pclmulqdq]

Put another way, if there are 10,000 shrines to this one saint around Europe, the probability that 7 will randomly be in a straight line on the Mercator projection is a lot higher than if there are <10.

[mensetmanusman]

10^-8 compared to -16?

[pclmulqdq]

I don't think it's that low. The number of coincidences will rise exponentially with the number of churches. You also have to account for the fact that there are something like 1000 prominent Catholic saints, and 10's of usable map projections, etc.

[lambdaone]

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points for a thorough treatment of this topic, with citations to the published literature.