ZAMORO, GIOVANNI MARIA of UDINE. - Capuchin theologian, b. at Udine in 1579, d. at Verona on 30 Aug. 1649. He entered the novitiate at Bassano on 8 Sept. 1598, after having taught philosophy and theology for several years.
In 1626 he published in Venice the Disputaciones theologicae de Deo uno et trino, which may be regarded as the first attempt at a universal reconciliation of the disputed questions among the great masters of Scholasticism and their disciples; Z., however, does not conceal his preference for the principles of the Scotist school, in the light of which he often interprets the opinions of the other doctors. Three years later he printed a substantial Mariological treatise: De eminentissima Deiparae Virginis perfectione (Venice, 1629), which aroused lively controversies during the pontificates of Urbano VIII and Innocenzo X in anti-Conception circles; Z. maintained, among other things, that the Blessed Virgin, by a special privilege, had been free from the proximate debt of contracting original sin, a doctrine that he further explained in other pamphlets and for which his first treatise was placed on the Index on 9 May 1636, where it remained until the revision ordered by Leone XIII and printed in 1900.
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