PRO-LIFE PRAYER WARRIOR LONDON'S FATHER TIM HAS LEFT A REVIEW!

Exactly 16 years ago, I was living in London full time, and I was going to a Traditional Latin Mass to be offered by Father Tim Finigan (back then he was stationed in Blackfen), and for the first time I collared him before he vested and asked his prayers at the Holy Sacrifice for the various women having crisis pregnancies. When I'd give him the intention - that irrespective of the situation the woman keep the baby and not abort - Father Tim's face always lit up and he smiled broadly and he looked so grateful to be entrusted with the intention. His eyes shone. Father Tim was always supremely willing and generous to offer prayer for the pregnant ladies.

One case sticks in my mind because I'm 41; she was an "older mother" who was faced with the prospect of having her first baby and raising a toddler well into her 40s. She'd never been in love before, and this was the first time she'd been in love, but the dad did not want to be a father at his time of life. They were among the younger members of the Boomer generation. While it took over 14 weeks for her to decide, and at the last minute she decided against a late-term abortion, she now has a teenager. 

Father's Tim soul was strong as an ox when I'd confide these situations to him. I can't say this was true of every priest - not that I'm blaming them for their natural 

reaction - but they sometimes were disquieted by the details that they'd elicit from me or from the pregnant mother herself. Once, I remember a newly ordained priest getting a call from a very young woman who was in the waiting room of an abortion clinic, and she called him just to say that she'd been baptized a Catholic in Eastern Europe and she just felt a priest should know that she was about to have an abortion and she didn't think the baby could be baptized. 

When he heard this, the priest went into a blind panic and could only muster the courage to ask her if he could give her number to me. She agreed, I called her, she left the clinic, met up with me and that baby is now a teenager. Baptized, too. And their life owes a lot to the prayers I begged from Father Tim.

It is with great delight that I discovered today Father Tim has left a review on Amazon for Padre Pio and You, "In this solid, informative and devout account of St Pio, Mary O'Regan has provided us with a thorough and informative biography that is also nourishing spiritual reading."

I am writing this on a very foggy day here in Los Angeles, like white sheets being tossed in the sky, reminding me of the London fog and all the happy evenings I walked in Bayswater with the white vapor like a dance of silk scarves before me. London is an expensive city, but the fog is free. 

PS - You might like a talk Father Tim gave at A Day With Mary,