St. Leo Shop and St. Leo League Records, Ade Bethune Papers

Ade Bethune was born in Brussels, Belgium on January 12, 1914. In 1928 her family immigrated to the United States, settling in New York. It was there that the young Bethune met Dorothy Day in 1934 and became involved with the Catholic Worker movement, a relationship that was to have a profound effect on her development as an artist. She produced a great deal of original art for the Catholic Worker, and many of her designs were reproduced as thank-you cards or Christmas cards for Catholic Worker readers. The demand for these cards led Bethune to set up an independent mail-order business, which led in turn to the formation of the St. Leo Shop as an outlet for distributing her work as well as other high-quality religious artwork and goods.

Bethune was heavily involved in the day to day operation of the shop, even as she simultaneously carried out many other substantial projects and artistic commissions throughout her life. The business was originally located in her house but eventually expanded in the 1950s to include a number of employees and the importation of goods from around the world; in 1964 it moved to its own location across the street from Bethune's home. At its height, the shop sold a wide variety of goods including: cards for religious occasions, icons, calendars, embroidery kits, metalwork, lace and holiday items. It also carried a variety of liturgical publications and became the main North American outlet for Maria Montessori’s books on education. Bethune published a yearly catalog that from 1957 onwards became the St. Leo Bulletin, a publication that included articles by her and other writers on sacred and liturgical arts.

Ade Bethune’s vision of artistic integrity and simplicity was the guiding principle of the St. Leo Shop. More than just a retail enterprise, the shop served as an outlet for her many ideas on Catholicism, iconography, and religious art and design. These ideas found further fruition in the formation of the St. Leo League in 1961. Originally conceived to celebrate the anniversary of the death of St. Leo, the group met once a month to discuss issues in liturgical art and to publish Sacred Signs, a quarterly publication on liturgical arts. The sporadic publication of Sacred Signs ceased in the early 1980s, about the same time that Bethune closed the St. Leo Shop and began to distribute her work through other outlets, including Terra Sancta Guild in Pennsylvania and Blue Cloud Abbey in South Dakota.

Ade Bethune died in Newport, RI, on May 1, 2002.