Once there he quickly began to consolidate his reputation as a priest who could rub shoulders with the rich and was also key in sponsoring youth programs that saw his parishioners putting their hands in their pockets to help fund inner-city charities. Todor got a lot of publicity for creating a controversial one called Angels Assist. It helped pregnant young women who didn’t want to become mothers. It allowed them to give birth in a ‘protected environment’ (Todor’s words) and then hand away their child for adoption to good Catholic families.

Todor came across in press interviews and public forums as someone who could convey what was essentially a rigid stance on the sanctity of the unborn child without sounding like a crazy. His was a sane, rational, persuasive pro-life voice. To many pro-choice campaigners Todor was the smooth-talking mouthpiece for the reactionary Catholic right. Certainly that was Klara’s take on the man she had grown up considering almost an uncle – but whose openly expressed desire to see the overturning of Roe versus Wade had turned him into what my then seventeen-year-old daughter called ‘an enemy of women’. The very fact that her mother had been, for many years, seriously involved in his Angels Assist work also made Klara consider Todor to be even more destructive. Especially as, a few years ago, Todor introduced Agnieska to a fellow daily communicant named Teresa. She was in her late forties; a one-time obstetrics nurse who’d been fired from her job at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after trying to convince a young woman not to terminate her pregnancy, cornering her minutes before the procedure, telling her that ‘murder was murder … even if the baby wasn’t yet born’. This caused a shitstorm of repercussions. It also resulted in her being blacklisted from every medical facility in Southern California. To the pro-life brigade Teresa – with her creepy saintly smile – was a martyr. Their very own Joan of Arc.