They're no angels, either!

I thought angels were supposed to be ethereal and beatific — qualities that can be conveyed even in stone.

But not the angels in the architecture of Toronto's Loretto Abbey Secondary School.

The Collegiate Gothic school that opened in North Toronto in 1928 has a pair of sweet cherubs on either side of the main entrance, one of which is shown below:

But Findlay and Foulis, the two Scottish-born architects who designed the building, somehow couldn't bring the same charm to the two angels flanking the south entrance:



Is it just me (and I don't mean to be mean), or are those two of the ugliest angels you've seen on any building? And especially a Roman Catholic building?

They're no angels...

Italian priest and self-described "angelologist" Father Renzo Lavatori told a conference on angelic art hosted by the Fondazione Archivio Storico and held in the Vatican-owned Palazzo della Cancelleria that angels don't have wings. In fact, he said, according to a story in Britain's The Independent newspaper that angels don't even have a recognizable human form - that they're more like shards of light.

"Angels do not have wings or look like cherubs,"The Independent quoted Father Lavatori. “You do not see angels so much as feel their presence… They are a bit like sunlight that refracts on you through a crystal vase."

After centuries of seeing angels as winged humans, I'm sticking with that portrayal, as with these angels from the Clarendon Apartments in Toronto (and featured in my book Faces on Places: A Grotesque Tour of Toronto; Anansi, 2006).

I'm not sure that Catholics are angel experts... They're no angels, after all.