STANCARO, FRANCESCO. - Italian heretic of the antitrinitarian movement, born in Mantua in 1501, died in Stobnice in Poland on 11 Nov. 1574.
Restless and impassioned, he took part in the most radical wing of the Italian evangelical movement (v.). A monk and priest, he had published a Hebrew grammar in Venice in 1530; he taught languages in Padua; in 1540 he is found in Friuli; he was imprisoned in Mantua and Venice for his religious doctrines. He decided to leave Italy; in the summer of 1544 he was in Vienna and in 1545 in Chiavenna in Valtellina, where the Mainardi, the Curione, Camillo Renato were already present, with whom, more or less intensely, he came into conflict; then in 1546 in Basel, where in 1547 he also published a Hebrew grammar. He then went to Cracow in Poland as a teacher of Hebrew; here he revealed himself as a heretic because of his iconoclastic attitude and was therefore removed from his chair and imprisoned. Having managed to escape to Königsberg (Prussia), he obtained a chair at the recently founded university there. He wished to interfere in the internal Lutheran controversies regarding 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 with only the human nature; nor did he cease from the controversy after moving to Frankfurt and did not hesitate to confront the authoritative Melanchthon. Thus even Lutheran Germany 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 came into conflict because of his quarrelsome nature and his refusal to accept 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. Y. Christo (Cracow 1562).