Where Are They Now?
Ade Bethune, Catholic Worker Artist

by James A. Merolla, The Providence Journal-Bulletin, 11/3/95. Reproduced with permission. The illustration is from the Works of Mercy series by Ade Bethune and is reproduced with the artist's permission.

Editor's Note: Ade Bethune passed away on May 1, 2002. Her obituary and other materials about her life may be found on Catholicworker.org.

Ade Bethune had the privilege of having her parents die in the comfort of their own home, surrounded by a hundred photographs and mementos of the family's glorious past in Belgium.

Her father had been a major in the Belgian army in World War I. Her grandfather had been president of the Senate. Speaking in her lilting accent with French and Flemish overtones, Bethune, at 81, a small, bright, silvery wisp of a woman, explains, "The general public tend to get funny ideas about aristocracy, often associate it with enormous wealth, opulence and idle pleasure-seeking. Instead, I was brought up with a serious sense of duty, responsibility and service to people. Noblesse oblige."

"My other grandfather was a magistrate in the Supreme Court of Belgium," she adds, pointing to a bearded bust of him she sculpted when she was 18. "My father wanted to come to the United States and develop inventions that he had made. But he was already past 50, and he had been damaged by World War I. He wasn't able to do it.

"My mother had been taught to do fine needlework and earned a living at home by making lingerie and laces for ladies of the social register. My father was almost 90 when he died. My mother, 96. They maintained themselves to the end. My father's memory was not very good, but he was able to take care of himself. He even learned to cook breakfast toward the end of his life. This wouldn't have been possible except that the three of us lived together as a community," she said.

To this end, Bethune, an accomplished stained glass and multi-media artist who has devoted much of her life to the Catholic Worker Movement, is dedicating the remainder of her life to secure affordable housing for the poor, the elderly, and, especially, the poor elderly.

In recent years, Bethune has been a liturgical consultant for church architecture and iconography, often assisting poorer and declining parishes in need of such expertise.

When friends speak of her, they will mention that she has received a dozen honorary degrees from a variety of universities. Bethune only shrugs. Honor do not interest her. God does. Lives do. People do.

While looking out her dining room window at a spectacular view of the entire span of the Pell Bridge, Bethune explained her goals.

"I am president of a group in process of buying the Carmelite Sisters' former convent and retreat house at Washington and Battery Streets," she says pointing to the property across from her front door. "The sisters very much need the funds, in part to repair a retirement home for their own sisters out in the Midwest."

Officially known as the Star of the Sea Nonprofit Corporation, Bethune's 15-member volunteer board of directors has worked tirelessly for several years and is now putting together what she calls an appealing financial package to make it possible for the nuns to sell their property and for 40 to 50 elders to secure a piece of the new intentional community.

Sponsorship by the private sector to provide a sliding scale fitted to aging people's means will answer Star of the Sea's aim to avoid exclusive dependency on government subsidies.

"Because the place was once a convent," says Bethune, "does not now limit it to the same. It had been a small summer mansion before that and will now be open to persons who choose to join, regardless of their religious affiliation."

"The unique thing is that there will not be a separation between low-income elderly and better-off elderly. It is difficult to do, but we are working on an involved approach to make it possible," she says.

Bethune says her idea will work because of "co-housing" in a cooperative of 40 to 50 individuals living together while also retaining privacy.

"I have a dream of elder folk spending their last decades in charge of themselves, not 'Home Alone' but 'Home Together,' with concerned neighbors nearby, ready to lend a hand. A neighborhood under one roof."

She says this concept, rather than one of impersonal institutions, will allow elders to live and die, with dignity, as her parents did.

After years of planning, figuring, questioning and discussing, Bethune says her group is now at the point where the "impossible dream" can become a reality: independent elders sharing a historical mansion in a beautiful site on Narragansett Bay.

To obtain a mortgage before construction begins, a founders group of future members are now starting to reserve their own unit and share in the cooperative center, a share which includes dining rooms with full or partial dining service, lounges, a library specializing in gerontology, a non-denominational chapel for religious services and a public hall/cultural center for lectures, concerts and other events.

Bethune adds that it is too soon to estimate how much each individual unit will cost to buy or the cost of monthly expenses.

"When people are older, they have their individual diminishments. Money is not so important. It is of greater importance that we retain our independence and not be lonely," she adds.

Most older people hate the concept of a nursing home, says Bethune. "What makes seniors unhappy in their old age is that they aren't allowed to do things. In institutions, I hear people complain 'They won't let me...' Not all elders need to be waited on hand and foot. Many are interested in doing things for others."

To illustrate her point, she recalls a moment from the Depression era when, as a budding artist, she was called upon by a Pittsburgh pastor to carve a crucifix for a church being built by the parish's unemployed steelworkers.

That commission brought her from New York to Newport, to the John Stevens Shop (founded in 175 by a builder of chimneys and carver of tombstones of Rhode Island's colonial days). Here Bethune learned the craft of woodcarving from John Howard Benson. To this day, the workshop continues to specialize in fine, hand-carved lettering, while Ade Bethune, too, is still living and working in Newport.

She remembers that for 13 years the Pittsburgh congregation had worshiped in a high school auditorium,

"Yes," she says, "if you had to, you could celebrate Mass in a garage or in a supermarket, but such buildings are not really well suited for that purpose. The pastor had written, 'Our unemployed people cannot contribute money, but we have able workers willing to build a glory barn for their congregation.'"

"Later, when I went to visit the finished church," recalls Bethune, "an older man pointed to one of the walls. 'You see,' he said, 'the third stone to the left, over the window? I put that one in.' He loved his stone and his church. He was so proud. I, too, am interested in making buildings human."