Our Story
The Ladies of Bethany are a religious congregation within the Roman Catholic Church, founded in the Diocese of Haarlem in 1919, inspired by Jesuit Jac.van Ginneken. The congregation’s aim was to employ well-educated women in faith education and catechesis, preferably for young people from working-class families. The Ladies’ work was characterized from the outset by a great openness to people with different views of other faiths. ‘Yet let Thyself be found by those who do not seek Thee’, used to be, and still is, their prayer.
At present the congregation has eleven members in the Netherlands and three members in Austria, Spain and the United States. A number of them are still very active, despite their often advanced age.
Our Mission
The Ladies of Bethany Chairs want to hand on the torch of inspiration so that it can live on in the lives of others, and to find new, future forms of the calling to help people to ‘open their eyes to the divine reality’. The chairs finance the education and research of a new generation of students and scholars, to support them in their (biblical-theological) education, formation, spiritual development, and professionalism. Especially women. Maybe this would also offer them a chance to develop into what Jacques van Ginneken intended when he founded the “Society of the Ladies of Bethany”: women fully involved with the world, with spiritual depth, cultured and universally minded.