Ade Bethune was a nineteen-year-old art student in New York when friends told her about the Catholic worker, a new movement that sought to relate the Gospel to social issues. When she saw their newspaper, she was attracted by its message but found it visually drab. On her own initiative, she sent a series of illustrations. A few days later, when she visited the Worker headquarters, Dorothy Day mistook her for a homeless woman seeking shelter. Shyly, she introduced herself: “I’m the girl who sent the pictures.” Immediately, Day set her to work on more illustrations. Among other things, she designed a new masthead for the paper, with Christ before the cross, his arms embracing two workers–one black and one white–their hands joined in solidarity.
In later years, Bethune would redefine the character of modern religious art. She worked in virtually every medium, from cast iron to stained glass. But whatever the form, her vocation as an artist always served her religious vision. As Day put it, her work reflected a “sense of the sacramentality of life, the goodness of things.” It was a lesson she derived from the saints, who showed that there is a road to holiness in everything we do, provided we do it with love.
Bethune died on May 1, 2002, at the age of eighty-eight.
“The saints are Christ. In their heroic deeds shines Christ’s example reflected and multiplied through time and space…Whether in death or in work, in word or silence, theirs is the Spirit of Christ.” –Ade Bethune
