Presentation for the Stillwater Catholic Worker

Last Friday, Collection curator Deborah Kloiber gave a presentation for the Stillwater Catholic Worker Community.  The community has regular Friday Evening Gatherings for dinner, evening prayer, and a featured speaker.  The presentation on the Ade Bethune Collection described how Ade Bethune met Dorothy Day and became involved in the Catholic Worker movement, and showed some of her art that appeared in the Catholic Worker newspaper.  Also included were photographs and sketches of local churches where Bethune's work can be seen, including a mosaic in the baptistry of the Cathedral of St. Paul, and stained glass windows in St. Leo's Church (now Lumen Christi), for which Bethune was the liturgical consultant.

The evening concluded with information about two parts of the Collection currently being processed:

• Records of the Church Community Housing Corporation, which Bethune helped found in 1969.  The CCHC provides low income housing in Newport, Rhode Island, and has also been involved in financial counseling for new homeowners
• Records of the Star of the Sea/Harbor House project, a new model elderly living community in Newport that opened in 2002

Both of these initiatives of Bethune's demonstrated how she adapted the work and values of the Catholic Worker movement to her own community of Newport.

Article on Visiting Scholar

The Fall 2010 issue of the Friends of the Libraries Newsletter contains a cover story on the Myser Research Grants to fund Visiting Scholars working in the Ade Bethune Collection. The first person to receive funding was Becky Davis, doctoral student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She visited the Collection for 7 days in late October to work on research for her dissertation: "Women Artists of the Early Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement: The Contributions of E. Charlton Fortune, Sr. Helene O'Connor, OP and Ade Bethune."

Ade Bethune Collection Received Grant

The Council on Library and Information Resources, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, awarded the Library a $92,125 "Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives" grant in November 2009. St. Catherine will be partnering with Marquette University, Catholic University of America, and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) on the Catholic Social Action Access Project (CSAAP).  The project, which received a total award of over $149,000 from CLIR, brings together three significant collections documenting U.S. Catholic social action in the 20th century.  Included is the Ade Bethune Collection, which documents the life and work of the world-renowned liturgical artist and social activist.  As a result of collaborating on the grant proposal, the Library became a member of the CRRA.

Work on the CSAAP was begun in January 2010 and will complete in December 2011. For the grant, Deborah Kloiber, Ade Bethune Collection Curator is working with other Library staff and MLIS graduate student interns to process and catalog parts of the Collection. This project will make more widely accessible Ade Bethune's activities with multiple community organizations in Newport, Rhode Island, including some that she founded:

• Church Community Housing Corporation
• Point Association
• East West Point Committee
• Foundation for Newport
• Citizens Advisory Committee
• Star of the Sea / Harbor House

Her involvement with these organizations reflects Bethune's interest in and concern for improving the city in which she lived--through housing, transportation, the environment, intelligent development, and other areas.

Finding aids for the processed materials will be added to the CRRA's Catholic Portal, which provides access to rare, unique, and uncommon materials in libraries, seminaries, special collections, and archives. By electronically bringing together resources in many formats from many collections, the Portal enables easy, effective and global discovery of Catholic research resources.

The Ade Bethune Collection

St. Catherine University’s Ade Bethune Collection (ABC) contains the papers of Ade Bethune, a world-renowned liturgical artist and social activist.  Ade Bethune made unique contributions to the field of sacred art and architecture as an artist, writer, and liturgical consultant, all flowing from her early association with Dorothy Day and the publication of her pictures in The Catholic Worker. Her career spanned over 70 years from art school in New York in the 1930s to her final projects in the early years of the 21st century. In Ade Bethune, St. Catherine University finds an apt symbol of its own mission and daily work—to educate women to lead and influence within the Catholic traditions of intellectual inquiry and social justice.

The extensive holdings of the ABC cover Bethune's entire career.  They consist of manuscript and printed materials, as well as a large variety of non-textual materials (graphic, sound, artifact).  There are approximately 400 linear feet of papers, books, periodicals, drawings, photographs, slides, films, and audio/video tapes.  In addition, there are about 170 cubic feet of oversized drawings, architectural plans, models, paintings, textiles, and artifacts.  The Collection contains examples of Bethune's work in many media: ink on paper, tempera, silkscreen, bronze, pewter, wood, textile, clay, and stained glass.