A Dutch Angel's Cellphone Number Is in Demand

'S HERTOGENBOSCH, the Netherlands — High on the cathedral in this trim Dutch town, amid a phalanx of stone statues of local noblemen, crusaders, saints and angels, one figure stands out. Smiling faintly, with lowered eyelids, one of the angels wears jeans, has a laptop bag slung over one shoulder and is chatting on a cellphone. The angel gets about 30 calls a day on the phone.
That is because, shortly after the statue was unveiled last April, a local couple, the parents of two children, set up a number so people could call the angel. Business cards soon appeared in pubs, restaurants and hotels with a picture of the angel and the number. So successful was the line that the couple opened a Twitter account, @ut_engelke, managed by the husband, which now has about 2,700 followers.
"The telephone is ringing all day," said the wife, who like her husband agreed to meet a reporter on the condition that they not be identified. "It was a fairy tale," she said over beer and snacks. "Now, it's real." To identify them, she said, would end it.
What began as a joke continues because the cellphone number has become something of a hot line, dialed by people of all ages, some in need of help, others just because they are lonely.
At the holidays, the calls became so frequent and so pressing that the couple was tempted to give up. "Between Christmas and New Year's, that was an emotional time frame, it was so heartbreaking," she said. A small girl called begging the angel to pray for a grandmother who had just died; a woman asked help to celebrate her first Christmas without her parents. A widow sought prayers for her dead children.
The statue of the Little Angel arose out of a 1997 competition, won by the Dutch sculptor Ton Mooy, to create 40 statues, including 14 angels, to replace those on the cathedral that time and pollution had ruined. The Little Angel was the only unconventional one.
"You can make a phony Gothic statue," Mr. Mooy, 63, said in his studio in Amersfoort, about an hour north of here. "That's not what I wanted. It had to fit in with what was always on the church, namely, refinement, emotion. Angels are there to guide, to protect people, they get messages from above. How do you show that? With a cellphone."
"I tell kids, 'There's one button on that cellphone,' " he said with a chuckle — a direct line to heaven. "So she doesn't get naughty, calling other angels."
The cathedral, which dates to 1220, has a centuries-old tradition of unusual, sometimes bawdy, art. One medieval statue is of a bricklayer bending over and baring his bottom. Some is tragic. A stained glass window over the main entrance depicts the apocalypse with a panel showing the Sept. 11 attack on the twin towers.
Catholic Church officials who administer the immense Gothic cathedral, dedicated to St. John the Evangelist, are not entirely amused. "Success has many fathers," said Pieter Kohnen, a cathedral board member. "And maybe exploiters."
The couple do not charge a fee for calls to the Little Angel, and insist they are not profiting from its spreading fame. But in December the church set up an official number for the public to phone the angel — for $1.07 a minute. Now, a sign next to the cathedral invites passers-by to "Call the Angel." A man's voice answers, giving the caller several options: "Dial 1, for a history of the church; dial 2, to learn what Christianity is about," and so forth.