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.
Neither unscheduled appearance fazed Willis, who had inaugurated the prayer broadcasts with the serious purpose of mitigating the isolation and loss of spiritual guidance felt by thousands of churchgoers following the shutdown of services in Britain and some other parts of the world. They could also be heard and shared in Christian communities where communal worship is difficult or even banned.
Willis’s gentle and deep reflections – an extension of his usual preaching style in normal times – helped transform the nature of prayer services and kept Christians in touch with their churches and, if his cats helped to magnify his congregation worldwide, he was happy with that. Leo and Tiger soon provoked memes: what were they doing under the cassock – disco dancing, perhaps? The dean’s online prayers, eventually numbering about a thousand, continued after restrictions were lifted, the last of them published two days before his death.
Willis became a familiar, benign and approachable figure at Canterbury during nearly 21 years as head of the cathedral, its services and administration: the 39th dean in a line stretching back to the Reformation and probably further, almost to the arrival of St Augustine in 597. He greeted passing tourists and canons genially all the same and would remind me, whenever I saw him in the course of my work as the Guardian’s religious affairs correspondent, that his older sister, Pauline, too, had worked at the newspaper, latterly as the editor’s secretary.
Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, praised Willis as “one of the most exceptional deans of the postwar period, overseeing Canterbury Cathedral’s life of worship, prayer and witness with creativity and imagination”, saying his online ministry during Covid “brought comfort and the hope of Jesus Christ to many thousands of people around the world”.
His was not the bombastic style of one of his predecessors, Hewlett Johnson, the “Red Dean”, supporter of Stalin, and the cathedral ran on traditional lines, in keeping with its status as the mother church of the Anglican communion and a Benedictine foundation, with prayers, clergy attendance required at daily services, meditations, preaching and choral singing. The pandemic lockdown had a disastrous effect on the cathedral’s tourist income, and the dean’s daily prayer podcasts were a way of mitigating its effects and keeping the cathedral spiritually in the public eye. Other churches followed that lead.
Willis was born in Bristol, the son of Thomas Willis, who worked in the aircraft industry, and his wife Vera (nee Britton), and he was educated at Kingswood grammar school and Warwick University. He trained for the ministry at Cuddesdon theological college, near Oxford, and took a theology diploma at Worcester College, Oxford, before serving after ordination as a curate in Shrewsbury.
He became vicar choral and chaplain to the cathedral school at Salisbury in 1975 and then team rector at Tisbury in Wiltshire, where he was also chaplain to Cranborne Chase girls’ school and RAF Chilmark, moving on to become vicar of Sherborne, rural dean and chaplain to the local girls’ private school there. In 1992 he was made dean of Hereford Cathedral, and nine years later transferred to Canterbury, where he served until retirement the day before his 75th birthday, in 2022.
While at Canterbury he oversaw the enthronement of two archbishops: Rowan Williams in 2003 and Welby in 2013. He also supervised the arrangements for the Lambeth conference meeting of the world’s Anglican bishops at Canterbury in 2008: a notably fractious gathering over the ongoing issue of gay rights within the worldwide communion and one which must have struck Willis particularly personally since he was himself quietly gay. His partner, Fletcher Banner, who survives him, was the person who filmed their garden congregation prayer meetings.
Willis wrote hymns, some of which feature in recent editions of Hymns Ancient and Modern and other hymnals, and a carol that was sung for the first time at the cathedral in 2016. He was a pianist and opera enthusiast. He chaired the governors of King’s school, Canterbury, and was a member of the council of Kent University (2003-09), as well as a freeman of the city, an honorary fellow of Canterbury Christ Church University and honorary doctor of divinity at Yale.
• Robert Andrew Willis, priest, born 17 May 1947; died 22 October 2024
