STANCARO, FRANCESCO. - Italian heretic of the anti-Trinitarian current, b. at Mantua in 1501, d. at Stobnice in Poland on 11 Nov. 1574.
Restless and passionate, he took part in the most radical current of Italian evangelism (v.). A monk and priest, he had published a Hebrew grammar at Venice in 1430; he taught languages at Padua; in 1540 he is found in Friuli; he was imprisoned at Mantua and Venice for his religious doctrines. He resolved to leave Italy; in the summer of 1544 he was at Vienna and in 1545 at Chiavenna in the Valtellina, where Mainardi, Curione and Camillo Renato already were, with whom, more or less intensely, he came into conflict; then in 1546 at Basel, where in 1547 he also published a Hebrew grammar. He then moved to Cracow in Poland as a teacher of Hebrew; here he revealed himself a heretic through his iconoclastic attitude and was therefore dismissed from his chair and imprisoned. Having managed to flee to Königsberg (Prussia), he obtained a chair in that recently founded University. He wanted to meddle in the internal Lutheran controversies concerning the interpretation of the Augsburg Confession, contested Osiander's (v.) thesis on justification, opposing to it his own, according to which Christ would be our mediator before God through the human nature alone; nor did he cease from polemic after moving to Frankfurt, and he did not fear to confront the authoritative Melanchthon. Thus Lutheran Germany too became inhospitable to him, and he sought a less hostile environment in Hungary and Poland, already invaded by neo-Arian propaganda. But even with the theologians closest to him he fell into conflict because of his quarrelsome character and his aversion to accepting any discipline, in the name of the free examination of the Bible, understood in a rationalist sense. His principal theological work is De Trinitate et mediatore D. N. J. Christo (Cracovis 1562).