[3] Born Baroness Adélaide de Bethune to a noble Belgian family, her parents were Gaston and Marthe Terlinden.

Bethune volunteered her illustrations to improve the quality of the Catholic Worker when she was a nineteen-year-old art student, impressed with the work of Dorothy Day.

De Bethune also worked closely with Graham Carey and with the Catholic Art Association, founded in 1937 by Sister Esther Newport.

[4][5] Beginning in the 1960s, she was the artistic director of the Terra Sancta Guild, a commercial firm that produced religious art works for many Christian denominations.

In 1991 she founded Star of the Sea to renovate a former Carmelite convent into an intentional community and state of the art housing for the elderly, where she lived until her death in 2002.