After James' freshman year at St. John's University, he received an appointment to USMA where he played varsity baseball while learning the more serious game of war. He put his martial lessons into practice immediately after graduation. With WWII in full operation, he was assigned to active duty with a tank corps in the European Theatre. Frequently exposed to shell fire, James experienced a hearing loss that was later exacerbated by hearing aids that made crowd noises sound like a bombardment.

Attaining the rank of major, James was named to the staff of GEN MacArthur involved in the postwar occupation and reclamation of Japan. In Tokyo, he became acquainted with the work of Father Hildebrand Yaiser, a pioneer Benedictine missionary in the process of persuading St. John's Abbey to support his pastoral Ministry at St. Anselm's Church in the Japanese capital. The spark of a monastic and priesthood vocation had been struck, and James resigned his commission, returned to the Collegeville campus in 1948, and entered the novitiate of St. John's Abbey the following year. Three days into the retreat, the abbey's Father Francis Bernick died, and James received the monastic name of "Francis" in honor of St. Francis Xavier, apostle of Japan and patron of foreign missions.

But James, who asked to return to his baptismal name three years before his death, never returned to Japan. His initial mission was to cope with the immaturity of his younger novitiate classmates and continue his military habit of composing frequent memos—he dubbed "poop sheets,"—with observations and suggestions for his new commanding officer, the novice master. After his first profession of vows in 1950, he commenced his seminary studies and was ordained into the priesthood in 1954.

James soon put his USMA training to use during a three-year term as Dean of Men for St. John's University. No stranger to strict discipline, he made rules for student conduct. In imitation of USMA, he inaugurated a student honor system for taking examinations. The project turned out to be more a matter of the faculty having the honor, and the students having the system. For a couple of years, he exercised his missionary zeal by coordinating the abbey's periodic mission collections in support of its dependent monastic communities in the Bahamas, Japan, Kentucky, Mexico, and Puerto Rico. During the '60s, he worked in the university's alumni and development offices, helping to mobilize the financial support of graduates and contacting prospective benefactors.

James' love of learning led to the master's program in theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Following his courses in scripture, and a special study of the soteriology of Karl Rahner, James was asked to serve as treasurer at the International Benedictine College of Sant' Anselmo in Rome. His spirit of obedience overcame his reluctance to accept this assignment, and, for eight months, he struggled to do his best to fulfill his duties. Upon his return to the States, James began a series of assignments as associate pastor of St. Boniface Parish in Hastings, MN; director of development at Benilde-St. Margaret High School in St. Louis Park, MN; and chaplain of the St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center at Moorhead State University and of the Campus Religious Center at Southwest State University in Marshall, MN.

His last and longest assignment was to the chaplaincies of St. Mary's Hospital and Riverside Medical Center in Minneapolis from 1978 to his retirement to the abbey in 1991. These halcyon years offered James the space and place to do the reading, reflecting, and writing that energized and excited him.

The focus of much of his intellectual endeavors during his last 20 years came from his pastoral experience of ministering to terminally ill patients with cancer or heart trouble. Finding it difficult to convince them that God was not punishing them, nor was God directly responsible for their illness, James mused long and hard over the theology of healing. His extensive reading from his personal library on religion and science, his probings into the mysterious world of quantum physics and subatomic particles, and his rejection of static metaphysics in favor of a constantly evolving world view, bore fruit in a number of challenging articles, including "The Evolutionary Worldview and Theology of Healing" and "Consciousness and Reality: Our Entry into Creation." He was well on his way to completing a book, The Mind and the Atom: What is Real?

In spite of the abstruseness of his writing—one of his editors admitted that James' "discussion of the new science makes difficult reading"—there is a clarity and simplicity in the following conclusion of his otherwise esoteric essay on the theology of healing: "[In illness] versions of 'Why me?' can rush upon us. I need a growing vision that God loves me, and is not punishing me. I need to believe that God is with me, to work with me to get well in a world where realistically there will come a time for me when the vigor of my life will be overcome by forces for physical death. And either way, I need the peace of Christ 'who is God reconciling the world to himself, not counting people's trangressions against them' (2 Cor. 5:19)."

These words took on personal meaning for James in 1990 when he was first diagnosed as having abdominal lymphoma and later when he was treated for cancerous lymph nodes. Enduring chemotherapy and radiation treatments, he knew that the resultant remission was only offering him borrowed time, because even "old soldiers DO die." He continued to bring a professional journal and a few note cards for collecting quotes to breakfast with him so he could satisfy his keen intellectual appetite, as well as his physical hunger.