It was a sunny day in Toronto when several thousand of us gathered on the lawn outside Queen’s Park to protest against either the abortion clinic that had opened on Harbord Street or the injunction that prevented us from walking past the clinic - I can’t remember which of the two protests it was that I first encountered Father Ted Colleton.

There were speeches and a band - many long speeches - and in the middle of them Father Ted. He started by asking if we could all hear him. “Yes,” we yelled. His grin told us something else was coming. “I was talking once,” he said, “and I forgot to ask if everyone could hear me until I was half way through. A fellow at the back shouted that he couldn’t and a lady in front called out, ‘well, you can change places with me, I’ve heard every blessed word.’”

This was the famous Father Ted, who had padlocked the rear gate of the Morgentaler abortuary, which was the entrance where the women used to go in. The abortuary was operating in the 1980s even though abortion was still illegal outside a hospital and without the consent of three doctors for each abortion. Later, after the injunction was passed, he went to the abortuary again and knelt on the rear step.

For those “crimes,” he was repeatedly arrested. On one occasion, the police decided to let him go, but he insisted that they do their duty since he admitted to breaking the law. He was found guilty and fined, but refused to pay, in his own words, “even five cents.” To no-one’s surprise, he ended up in prison, along with other pro-life warriors, the Rev Ken Campbell, Dr. Ray Holmes, and Fr. Alphonse de Valk.

Some time after that afternoon at Queen’s Park, another pro-life warrior, Linda Gibbons, was carted off to prison and pro-lifers gathered again, this time to protest outside the prison in Mimico. Father Ted was there also, irrepressible, stalwart and in earnest, but clearly having fun. It was as if when he protested, he was filled with the joy of the Holy Spirit. The windows at the prison are just little slits, so we were unable to see Linda as she passed by, if, indeed, any of the shadows through the glass was of her.

So, led by our intrepid Holy Ghost father, a few of us trooped around to the front door. Someone rang the door bell. There was no response, so Father Ted lifted his cane and leaned the point of it on the bell-push. A woman guard came out to forbid this disturbance. Whatever it was she expected to find, it wasn’t a Catholic priest in his black suit and Roman collar and a leprechaun grin.

Father Ted wasn’t fazed at all by authority when he was fighting for what he believed to be right. He demonstrated that in Kenya as a missionary for 30 years, at the end of which he was thrown out personally by Jomo Kenyatta for criticizing the Kenyan leader’s refusal to credit the missionaries for educating the country’s youth.

In his book, Yes, I’d Do It Again, about his years in Africa, and often when he spoke, he mentioned how he had never heard of abortion in Kenya, how the two African languages he spoke didn’t even have a word for abortion. But when he came to Canada he found a paganism he had not encountered in his years on a continent the colonizers held was uncivilized.

Yes, he would do his 30 years of fighting for children in the womb again if he could. Instead, he has gone to his reward and left the rest of the fight to us.

Yes, Father Ted, we will do it. We would do it all again if we could.

And, yes, we have heard every word, and each one was blessed.