Digital relics

First we have projectors acting as very versatile stained glass windows and now camara phones make it into the religious repertoire. "Last week, as the body of Pope John Paul II lay in state at St Peter's Basilica in Rome, 18,000 people an hour shuffled past, many wielding cameraphones. 'In the past, pilgrims would take away a relic, like a piece of cloth on the saint's body,' Gianluca Nicoletti, a media commentator for Italy's La Stampa newspaper, told the New York Times . 'Here, there's been the transposition to a level of unreality. They're bringing home a digital relic.'"
I wonder how long it will be before the RC church classifies them as third class relics and defines how many days of purgatory they'd be worth and what kind of intereaction with them would be necessary to gain the merit? -I'm being naughty, of course.

It's worth reflecting, though, how strong is the drive for keepsakes that lies, I reckon, behind the relic business. We see it at work at rock concerts, football stadia, university bookshops [scarves and rugby shirts, anyone?] and we see it religified most controversially in relics but ports do it too, just in less 'idolotrous' ways [please note the scare quotes before lambasting me for using the term: I'm writing agnostically at this point]. Just go into your nearest non-RC Christian bookshop if you doubt the protestant urge for commidification of religion.
The Observer | UK News | Smile! You're on candid cameraphone: