Angel’s cellphone number is in great demand
Woman offers a voice for modern-day statue on Dutch cathedral
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 in 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 hotline, dialed by people of all ages, some in need of help, others just because they are lonely.
During 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 phoney Gothic statue,” 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 art. One medieval statue is of a bricklayer bending over and baring his bottom. A stained-glass window over the main entrance depicts the apocalypse with a panel showing the Sept. 11 attack on the twin towers.
The couple do not charge a fee for calls to the Little Angel, and insist they are not profiting from its spreading fame. Callers never get an answering machine. The woman who provides the angel’s voice explained. “I say, ‘Hello, this is the Little Angel,’ and then various things can happen,” she said.
Not all callers are in dire need of help. “Kids under 10 are the best,” she said with a laugh. “What language do I speak? What’s for dinner? Are you cold? What about the rain, no umbrella?”
Students seek help with exams, others with driving tests. “My answer’s always the same: I will blow some angel magic to you,” the woman said. Others just want to vent. “They talk about the church, about the abuse scandals, and so forth,” she said.
“In most cases there is laughter, but there are callers who have no faith in friends or relatives, so they would like to talk to someone they have some kind of faith in,” she said.
Albert van Osch, 52, a musician, liked the angel so much he brought his mother and a friend to admire her on a recent rainy afternoon. “These are modern times,” he said. “This is completely modern.”
She does not feel she is deceiving anyone by impersonating the angel. “If someone is serious, I am serious,” she said. “If someone is calling for a prank, I go along with that.”
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.”
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 passersby 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.
Kohnen said the number gets about 100 calls a week. The goal, he said, was, “to promote the Gospel, evangelize, but also financial.” About $940,000 a year is required for the cathedral’s upkeep.
The Little Angel is a celebrity and the cathedral has become the buzz of the town.
The couple knows that church officials are displeased. “They would like us to stop, though they haven’t told us directly,” the husband said. “We are not getting any money, and we are not competing with the church.”
She is not sure how much longer they will do it. “Till I get fed up with it, I guess,” the wife said. “Sometimes it’s hard.”
But it is still fun, too. When Steve Jobs died, the phone rang endlessly. The angel, she said, told callers: “Steve Jobs will soon arrive upstairs — perhaps I’ll get a new model!”