James Marty was born in Canton Schwyz, Switzerland, on January 12, 1834,[1] the son of a shoemaker and church sexton and his wife.

In 1860, Abbot Heinrich Schmid von Baar ordered Marty to travel to the United States to take over the abbey's debt-ridden daughter's house at St. Meinrad, Indiana.

Although the assignment was intended to last only one year, Marty proved so adept at building up the formerly failing monastery that Schmid von Baar decided that it was God's will for his young protégé to remain there.

Although Marty immediately obeyed, he would always feel that he had undergone a "temporary defeat" in his dream of drawing the Benedictine Order closer to diocesan clergy, who used the Roman Breviary.

[4] Marty is credited with the founding of St. Benedict's Priory in Logan County, Arkansas, in 1878, with three monks from St. Meinrad Archabbey.

[4] In July 1876, Marty departed Indiana by steamer for Standing Rock in Dakota Territory, along the upper Missouri River, where he intended to found a Benedictine monastery to assist the Lakota people.

[1] Marty worked among the Lakota people living on the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota.

In 1880 Marty persuaded Benedictine sisters from Missouri to assist him at Fort Yates, a mission among the Yankton Sioux.

[8] On November 26, 1889, Pope Leo XIII appointed Marty as the first bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls, which, at that time, comprised all of South Dakota.