If it is true that God works in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, then the intervention of his cats into online sermons broadcast during the Covid pandemic in 2020 helped to propel the Very Rev Robert Willis, dean of Canterbury Cathedral, to an appreciative worldwide audience thought to number millions.
Willis, who has died suddenly aged 77 in post-Canterbury retirement, while a resident fellow of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale University, found himself an unlikely and unwitting internet celebrity as his cat Leo strolled nonchalantly under his cassock while he was giving a brief talk during a morning prayer YouTube video in the deanery garden. A later broadcast saw another of Willis’s cats, Tiger, quietly help himself to the cream jug and pancakes on a table beside the dean on Shrove Tuesday 2021.
