James was specially devoted to the Passion of Christ and Virgin Mary, he was carrying by a penitential act, delivering the long-term prayers and contemplation, and even fell into raptures few times.

It was there that he felt a deep call to religious life and thus decided to join the Order of Friars Minor in Bitetto.

It was on 19 December 2009 that he was proclaimed to be Venerable after Pope Benedict XVI recognized that James had lived a life of heroic virtue.

The hagiographer Alban Butler wrote in his Lives of the Primitive Fathers, Martyrs, and Other Principal Saints (1798), St. James of Sclavonia, or Illyricum, Confessor Though a native of Dalmatia, from which country he received his surname, he spent the chief part of his life on the opposite coast of the Adriatic sea, in Italy, where he embraced with great fervour the humble and penitential state of a lay-brother among the Observantin Franciscan friars at Bitetto , a small town, nine miles from Bari.

By an eminent spirit of compunction, humility, self-denial, and heavenly contemplation, he seemed not to fall short in fervour of the greatest lights of his Order.

He was seen by a fellow-friar, whose testimony is produced in the process for his canonization, raised in body from the ground at prayer, and many predictions, authentically proved, show him to have been often favoured by God with a prophetic spirit.

[6] He was sometimes removed to other neighbouring convents of his Order; and he was for some years employed in quality of cook in that of Conversano, eighteen miles from Bari.

[6] In this office, from the presence and sight of a temporal fire, he took occasion sometimes to contemplate the everlasting fire of hell, and at other times to soar in spirit above the highest heavens, to the source of infinite love which burns through all eternity, begging some spark to be kindled in his breast from this divine flame, which darts its rays on all creatures, though many unhappily shut their hearts to them, and receive not their influence.

[8] St. James was sent back by his superiors to Bitetto , and there closed a holy life by a most happy death, in 1485, on the 27th of April: but his festival occurs on the 20th in the Martyrology published by Pope Benedict XIV.

His body remains uncorrupted at Bitecto; and an account of many miracles wrought through his intercession is collected from authentic vouchers by Papebroke, in April, t. 3, p. 527.