Though he is no longer pope, Pope Emeritus Benedict was always a cat lover, and his kindness toward the strays of Rome was legendary. His house in Germany, its garden guarded by a cat statue, was filled with cats when Benedict lived there full time before he was posted to the Vatican in 1982. Sadly, his holiness couldn’t have a cat of his own because pets are not permitted to live in the papal residence in Vatican City.

Though we are a dog-centric site (and pssst, don’t tell anyone, but we like cats!), we “forgave” Pope Benedict his preference for felines over canines because back in 2010 when a group of Saint Bernard puppies from Germany visited Pope Benedict, one of the excited youngsters had an “incident” of an unfortunate nature on the Pontiff’s silk slipper. Said a Vatican insider “The dog’s owner was mortified, but His Holiness simply shook the poop off the soiled slipper and blessed the relieved dog.”

A cat person that dog lovers could embrace. Just saying.

Benedict, however, was not the first cat loving pontiff. According to “The Papacy: An Encyclopedia,” by Philippe Levillain, Pope Paul II, in the 15th century, had his cats treated by his personal physician, and Leo XII in the 1820s reared his grayish-red kitten, “Micetto,” in the pleat of his cassock. And finally, The Times of London once reported that Paul VI, pope from 1963 to 1978, once dressed his cat in cardinal’s robes.