STANCARO, FRANCESCO. — Italian heretic of the antitrinitarian movement, b. at Mantua in 1501, d. at Stobnice in Poland on 11 November 1574.
Restless and passionate, he took part in the evangelism (v.). A monk and priest, he had published a Hebrew grammar in 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 decided to leave Italy; in the summer of 1544 he was in Vienna and in 1545 at Chiavenna in Valtellina, where Mainardi, Curione, and Camillo Renato were already present, with whom he entered into conflict, more or less intensely;
then in 1546 at Basel, where in 1547 he also published a Hebrew grammar. He then went to Kraków in Poland as a teacher of Hebrew; there he revealed himself as a heretic through his iconoclastic attitude and was therefore removed from his chair and imprisoned. Having succeeded in escaping to Königsberg (Prussia), he obtained a chair at that recently founded University. He wished to intervene in the internal Lutheran controversies concerning the interpretation of the Augsburg Confession; he disputed Osander’s (v.) thesis on justification, opposing to it his own, according to which Christ would be our mediator with God solely through his human nature; nor did he cease his polemics after moving to Frankfurt, and he did not hesitate to confront the authoritative Melanchthon. Thus Lutheran Germany also became inhospitable to him, and he sought a less hostile environment in Hungary and Poland, already invaded by neo-Arian propaganda. But he also came into conflict with the theologians closest to him 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).