The statue of an angel outside St. John the Evangelist Cathedral in 's Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, holds a cellphone, which has two numbers.
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.
“We chose a male actor, for his trustworthy voice,” explained Mr. Kohnen, noting that 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.
Competition has erupted.
The Little Angel is a celebrity.
Church attendance may be flagging and the Catholic Church’s image tarnished by past child-abuse cases, but the cathedral has become the buzz of the town.
Callers to the earlier number, where they pay only the regular rate for calling a cellphone, 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.
A widow in her 80s called from Amsterdam to complain of loneliness — bad weather prevented her going out and there was no one to bring in groceries; moreover, her sink needed repairs for the equivalent of $135.
“She said she’d lost faith in humanity, in her own family,” said the woman who lends the angel a voice.
Two weeks later the elderly woman called again, to thank the angel.
Things had gotten better.
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.”
The woman who gives the angel a voice said she tries to impart a message of tolerance.
A school class called recently from the southern province of Zeeland.
“The kids asked why Catholics eat pork and Muslims don’t,” she said. “I said, ‘Well, Hindus are not allowed to eat cows, so perhaps Catholics are very much in between.”
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.”
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!”