Con Fitzgerald and Daisy Kearney rehearsing for the Wrenboys
in Listowel recently.

Coffee Morning

The recent Coffee Morning in aid of Milford Hospice raised a record €1,620. Sincere thanks to everyone for your wonderful support and to all the ladies who helped out on the day.

ST. ITA’S HOSPITAL 

Our church gate collections are back again thankfully, and as always we would be so grateful for your continued support as always  from Athea. This Saturday evening 8th sees our first again since Covid. We are continually raising for equipment for our patients to help with their restoration to good health again through physio etc. Every little helps us and we all know someone who had benefited from St. Ita’s. We thank you sincerely in advance.

Athea C.C.E.  A.G.M.

This will take place at the Top of the Town on Monday night, Oct. 10th. at 8:30 pm. All welcome.

St. Bartholomew’s Church Athea

Mass Intentions next weekend   Sat Oct 8^th at 7.30pm

Martin Healy (Coole West).  Thomas (Tom) O’Halloran. Timmy Murphy (Month’s Mind)

John Paul Stack (1^st Anniversary) and all deceased members of the Stack & Loftus families.

Mass during the week: Tuesday morning 9.30am.   and   Friday evening (first Friday) 7pm.

Confessions after mass on Friday evening.

Eucharistic Adoration & The Devine Mercy Chaplet on Tuesday morning after mass.

All masses are streamed live on https://www,churchservices.tv/athea

Ministers of the Word Ministers of the Eucharist

Sat 8/10       John Redmond / Denise O’Riordan Angela Brouder O’Byrne / Margaret Ahern

Parish Office Hours: Monday – Friday 11am-1pm

Contact Siobhán on 087-3331459. or email the parish office at [email protected]

The Way I See It

By Domhnall de Barra

There were at least four people who were respected (or feared) in every parish like Athea in the days gone by. They were the priest, the school master, the guard and the doctor. They were all men at the time which seems as if it was way back in the dark ages but no, this was in my lifetime and very recent in the grand scheme of things. Why were they all men? – the answer is that history is not good to women who were treated very much as second class citizens. Some of this had its roots in religion. At school we were taught the Bible and one of the stories there was how God felt that it was not good for Adam to be alone in the Garden of Eden so he made a companion for him out of an old spare rib he had no use for. How we ever swallowed such a ridiculous theory is beyond me but it set the grounds for the woman’s place in the religious world. She was not an equal to a man but was there to support and obey him in every way. This was plain to be seen in the wedding vows where she had to promise to “love, honour and obey”. There were strict lines drawn between women’s and men’s work, the man’s being considered more important. I remember my own mother and her sisters would always feed the husbands first when they were home on holidays and the men never washed a cup or took a towel in their hands to dry it. Married women stayed in the home and had no income of their own, depending on the husband for money for shopping and the necessities. Now, most husbands were very good but there were some who were mean and did not treat their wives as well as they should have. The women just had to grin and bear it. When Ireland got its independence, a woman who worked for the government had to give up her position as soon as she got married. The thought behind was that one income was enough for any household and the woman’s job could go to somebody else who needed it. It was unthinkable at the time to consider a woman for the post of school principal just as it was to consider her for a job in the Gardaí. Being a guard was a job for a big strong man and we had plenty of them back in the day. Most small villages had a sergeant  and one or two guards who had little to do but look for dog licenses and take farmers to court for having noxious weeds on the land. Even when women were allowed they weren’t referred to as Gardaí; they were called “Ban Gardaí” and for a long time were restricted to desk jobs and not considered good enough for proper policing duties. It also took years for women to get  ahead in the medical world. I wasn’t a child anymore when I encountered my first female doctor but now, thank God, things have changed and the gender balance may even be swinging towards the women. This is certainly true in teaching where there are far more females than males. We also have females in the top jobs in the Gardaí who are doing a fantastic job but I’m afraid the story is not the same in the church. Despite the fact that there is a scarcity of vocations and there aren’t enough priests to go around, the aged men who rule the Vatican refuse to consider ordaining women. They are a bit like Ostriches with their heads firmly buried in the sand  but one day soon they will, too late, realise that the world has passed them by and they have no more relevance or influence. If women can be top surgeons, police inspectors, Heads of State and leaders  of the world, why can they not be trusted to look after, and administer to, the faithful in a parish. I personally think they would do a far better job than most of the priests I know as they have shown in other Christian churches. Today, we live in a more enlightened society where everybody has equal opportunity except for the Catholic Church so it is time that they changed their ways before more church doors are closed for good.

Last week I wrote about the gramophone and how it had to be wound up to operate the turntable that held the record. It got me thinking of other devices that used the same method of power, a coiled spring, to operate them. One of these devices that had great precision was the clock. Every house had at least one clock that had to wound up by hand once a day. These clocks came in various shapes and sizes, the biggest being a “grandfather clock”, that usually stood in a hallway of a big house. This had a winding mechanism but also used swinging pendulums to regulate the movements. Ordinary houses had much smaller time pieces, even some funny ones. In one of our class rooms at school there was a “cuckoo clock”. Every hour, on the hour, a wooden cuckoo poked his head out of a little house and gave a loud cuckoo sound instead of the bell sound that came from normal clocks. As kids we were fascinated at first by this and waited patiently for the hour to come but after a while it became normal. There was another type of clock that had a little house on top and, depending on the weather, a man or a woman would be sent outside. If it was raining, the man was outside and, if it was fine, the woman took his place. Don’t ask me how it worked but it was pretty accurate. As time went on the “eight day clock” was invented. This had to be wound up just once a week and usually kept very accurate time. Men carried a pocket watch, about two inches in diameter, which was attached to a chain that could be affixed to the lapel of a jacket while the watch itself went into an inside pocket or the pocket of a waistcoat. There was great pride in having a good one of these.  When the radio was introduced to rural Ireland, an Abbeyfeale man bought one for the family. On the first evening, The Angelus came on at six o’clock. The man took his watch from his pocket, looked at it and declared, “that little radio is a good timekeeper”.