"I Feel Like I've Seen Mecca"

Among her many interests, Ade Bethune was a proponent of the teachings of Maria Montessori. Bethune's St. Leo Shop became an outlet for Montessori's books, which were imported from India in the late 1950s and 1960s. In addition, Bethune sold her own booklets for writing instruction--"Teaching the Child to Write" (originally published in Jubilee magazine) and Uniscript: A New Method for Teaching Handwriting--which were based on Montessori's principles. The Ade Bethune Collection has copies of both of these, along with a set of plaster letters for children to trace with a finger.

I had been meaning to let the Montessori department at St. Kate's know the connection between Ade Bethune and Montessori's work, and had an opportunity to do Friday. One of their faculty members was visiting the Archives for another reason. I told her that Bethune had sold Montessori's books in her shop and we had those and other Montessori-related items in the Collection. After seeing the plaster letters and looking through the writing booklets, she told me she was speechless and wanted to come back later to spend more time looking through the materials.  Her comment in the heading is how she described the experience to a colleague.

This encounter reminded me, yet again, how many hidden treasures are in the Ade Bethune Collection. Bethune herself was a complex and talented woman whose work and interests went far beyond her more commonly known tag of "Catholic Worker artist." There are gems to be explored by those involved in many fields, and it is my job to make them more widely known--to the St. Kate's community and beyond.

Saint Joseph the Worker

Saint Joseph the Worker (#3404)

Since 1955, May 1st has been celebrated as the feast of St. Joseph the Worker, adding a religious dimension to the labor union celebrations and military parades surrounding "May Day." Based on Joseph's occupations as a carpenter, it is a day devoted to the dignity and virtue of labor, perhaps especially of working to produce with one's own hands. The Catholic Worker movement took Joseph the Worker as its patron saint and the first issue of its newspaper was published in May 1933. One year later, Ade Bethune's drawings appeared for the first time in the May 1934 issue of The Catholic Worker. That issue contained four of her images, including this depiction of Saint Joseph at work in his carpentry shop. It was also in the May anniversary issues that her original (1935) and revised (1985) mastheads for the newspaper debuted.

The appearance of Saint Joseph and her other drawings in The Catholic Worker helped launch Bethune's fame as an artist. Nearly all of Bethune's succeeding work can be traced to connections and ideas originating because of her involvement with the Catholic Worker movement. But St. Joseph the Worker carries additional significance to her work. In 1937 she published the treatise Work, an essay on the dignity of labor and the worship of God implied in a job done well. She later turned some of these same ideas into "The Person and the Industrial Counter-Revolution," a talk she gave at the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University) in 1939 for the 3rd meeting of the Catholic Art Association. It was also the title of a 1940 article she published in the CAA's journal, Christian Social Art Quarterly.

With all these connections to the day and ideals of Saint Joseph the Worker, it is somehow fitting that Ade Bethune died on May 1, 2002.

New Resources Online

We've been busy the past few weeks making more information and resources about the Ade Bethune Collection available online. There are new additions to the Library's Digital Collections of articles written by Ade Bethune and published in Catholic Art Quarterly. Digital versions of 8 typescripts in various forms of draft and one manuscript are now accessible online for viewing. The full text of the articles can also be searched.  Take a look!

Titles of the articles are:

• Font and Altar: Footnotes on Sacred Architecture (1954)
• Revising our Conception of the Communion Rail (1958)
• Some Suggestions on Teaching Design (1947)
• Symbols of the Spirit (1954)
• Version 1
• Version 2
• The Person and the Industrial Counter-Revolution (1940)
• The Raising of Lazarus: a play (1949)
• The Tabernacle and the Altar Facing the People (1959)
• Version 1
• Version 2

The article "The Person and the Industrial Counter-Revolution" may be of particular interest to the St. Catherine University community.  It is based on a speech she gave in 1939 at the 3rd meeting of the Catholic Art Association, which was held on the St. Kate's campus.