Br. James

Alberto Javier Saiz de la Mora was born on January 30, 1931 in Cuba, where he attended grammar and high school until he entered the novitiate in Cuba on January 25, 1949. He received the habit and the religious name of Brother James. James taught at Colegio De La Salle in Cuba from 1951 to 1961 until he was transferred to Barranquilla, Columbia, South America, where he taught at Colegio Biffi-La Salle for a year. He then was sent to Colegio La Salle in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico in 1962 for a year before he was assigned to Colegio San Jose in Bluefields, Nicaragua. James spent three years in Nicaragua before being assigned to teach in the United States at Holy Name High School in Escanaba, Michigan in 1967. The following year he worked at St. Mary's College in Winona and a year later at De La Salle High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He spent two years there before moving to Cretin High School in 1970 where he spent the next twelve years. In 1983 he was assigned to the Hispanic Apostolate for the Catholic Diocese in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1985 James took a pastoral associate job at Incarnation Parish in New York City and remained there for six years until he was assigned to Christian Brothers Community in St. Paul in the fall of 1991. He returned to another pastoral associate assignment in the fall of 1996 as Ascension Church in New York, but only remained there for one year before he retired in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1997. He was a volunteer at Calle Santiago in the Dominican Republic from 1999 to 2004 when he returned to Minnesota. For health reasons he entered Lake Ridge Nursing Home in Roseville, Minnesota, in 2006 where on November 20th he suffered a stroke and never regained consciousness. He was seventy-five years of age at the time of his death and had been a De La Salle Christian Brothers for fifty-seven years.