Ade Bethune

Ade Bethune
Born
Adélaide de Bethune

(1914-01-12)January 12, 1914
DiedMay 1, 2002(2002-05-01) (aged 88)
NationalityBelgian
EducationCooper Union
Known for
  • Woodcuts
  • illustration
MovementCatholic social art

Ade Bethune (January 12, 1914 – May 1, 2002) was an American Catholic liturgical artist.

She was associated with the Catholic Worker Movement, and designed an early masthead of its publication, the Catholic Worker, first used in 1935. She later re-designed this in 1985, replacing one of the men with a woman.[1]

Bethune was an advocate of traditional iconography.[2]

She is buried at Portsmouth Abbey, Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

She was she was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 1990.[3]

Early life[edit]

Born Baroness Adélaide de Bethune to a noble Belgian family, her parents were Gaston and Marthe Terlinden. She emigrated with the family after World War I. Her mother Marthe was daughter of Viscount Terlinden.

Career beginnings[edit]

She volunteered her illustrations to improve the quality of the Catholic Worker when she was a nineteen-year-old art student, impressed with the work of Dorothy Day. This was preparation for her later illustration for Catholic liturgical works such as My Sunday Missal in 1937, and similar works such as My Lenten Missal.

De Bethune also worked closely with Graham Carey and with the Catholic Art Association, founded in 1937 by Sister Esther Newport.[4][5]

Terra Sancta Guild[edit]

Beginning in the 1960s, she was the artistic director of the Terra Sancta Guild, a commercial firm that produced religious art works for many Christian denominations.

Social activism[edit]

Ade was interested in the Catholic Worker Movement's work with hospitality for the poor when she was an art student. She continued this interest throughout her life, and became interested in the issue of providing housing for the elderly, particularly the poor elderly. In 1969, she founded the Church Community Housing Corporation in Newport County, Rhode Island, to design and build housing. In 1991 she founded Star of the Sea to renovate a former Carmelite convent into an intentional community and state of the art housing for the elderly, where she lived until her death in 2002.

Artistic works[edit]

Biography[edit]

  • Judith Stoughton: Proud Donkey of Schaerbeek: Ade Bethune, Catholic Worker Artist St. Cloud, Minnesota, North Star Press of St. Cloud, 1988 ISBN 0-87839-051-0
  • On-line short biography
  • James A. Merolla Where are they now? Ade Bethune, Catholic Worker artist
  • Information from the Catholic Worker

Sources[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Gneuhs, Geoffrey (May 3, 2008). "The Art of the Worker". Catholic Worker. LXXV: 6.
  2. ^ "Religion: Familiar Faces". Time. January 5, 1962. Archived from the original on November 23, 2008. Retrieved April 23, 2010.
  3. ^ "Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame: Ade Bethune, Inducted 1990". Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on February 3, 2020. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
  4. ^ Price, Jay M. (2013). Temples for a Modern God: Religious Architecture in Postwar America. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199925957.
  5. ^ Harmon, Katharine E. (2013). There Were Also Many Women There: Lay Women in the Liturgical Movement in the United States, 1926-59. Liturgical Press. ISBN 9780814662717.
  6. ^ "Church of the Angry Christ". 2 June 2006. Retrieved 25 November 2009.
  7. ^ Helfrich & Whittaker, Kurt & William (2006). Crafting a Modern World, The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond. Princeton Architectural Press. p. 56.