An original oil painting by a Rapid City artist depicting early Catholic evangelization efforts among Native Americans will hang in a German monastery to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the arrival in America of the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart.

That Catholic religious order founded the St. Joseph Indian School in Chamberlain in 1927. The order is a worldwide Catholic congregation whose members (priests, brothers and deacons) live a life of religious dedication.

The area near Chamberlain that is now the Lower Brule Indian Reservation was the first place the Sacred Heart priests came, according to Toni Rangel, the artist commissioned to paint the historical image. Rangel's painting is for the German province of the order.

Rangel, a member of the Dakota Artists Guild and the Portrait Artists of America, spent five months creating the 3-foot-by-5-1/2-foot oil-on-linen canvas painting. It shows a priest in a black cassock kneeling to pray with Native American children and women in front of a log cabin and tipi. It will be shipped to Nesudat, Germany, for an unveiling during an Oct. 1 anniversary event.

Rangel was commissioned to do the painting by Deacon David Nagel, former administrator of St. Joseph's, because she did an earlier painting for the school, which hangs in its visitors' center. That painting depicts Jesus Christ with arms outstretched in the Badlands of western South Dakota.