Father Ludovico Maria Sinistrari, of the Order of Reformed Minors of the strict Observance of St. Francis, was born in Ameno, a small town of the district of St. Julius, in the diocese of Novara, on the 26th of February 1622. He received a liberal education and went through a course of humanities in Pavia, where, in the year 1647, he entered the Order of Franciscans. Devoting himself henceforward to tuition, he was first a professor of Philosophy; he then, during fifteen successive years, taught Theology in the same town, amidst a numerous concourse of students attracted from all parts of Europe by his high repute. His sermons preached in the principal cities of Italy, at the same time as they caused his eloquence to be admired, were productive of the happiest results for piety. Equally endeared to the World and to Religion, he had been favoured by nature with the most brilliant gifts: square frame, high stature, open countenance, broad forehead, sparkling eyes, high-coloured complexion, pleasant conversation replete with sallies of wit; more valuable still, he was in possession of the gifts of grace, through which he was enabled to sustain, with unconquerable resignation, the assaults of an arthritical disease he was subject to; he was, moreover, remarkable for his meekness, candour and absolute submission to the rules of his Order. A man of all sciences, he had learnt foreign languages without any master, and often, in the general Meetings of his Order, held in Rome, he supported, in public, theses de omni scibili. He, however, addicted himself more particularly to the study of Civil and Canon laws. In Rome he filled the appointment of Consulter to the supreme Tribunal of the Holy-Inquisition; was some time Vicar general of the Archbishop of Avignon, and then Theologian attached to the Archbishop of Milan. In the year 1688, charged by the general Meeting of Franciscans with the compilation of the statutes of the Order, he performed this task in his treatise entitled Practica criminalis Minorum illustrata. He died in the year of our Lord 1701, on the 6th of March, at the age of seventy-nine.
