UNIONE ECONOMICA SOCIALE. — Italian Catholic institution coordinating numerous economic and social works among Italian Catholics, established after the encyclical Il fermo proposito (11 June 1905), inheriting the tasks of the Second Group for Christian Popular Opera dei Congressi (v.). Presided Medolago Albani (v.), in 1906 it was constituted as the U. E. S., which held its first assembly on 5 March 1907.
The tasks assigned to the U.E.S. by Bl. Pio X, in a brief of his, were: to coordinate and direct, for economic-social activity, the diocesan meetings of Catholic Action; to promote professional unions among workers, coordinating their activity; and to unite higher aims of education and culture with the care of material interests. By about 1911, 353 propaganda associations, 26 people’s secretariats, 1,055 mutual-aid societies, 242 cooperatives, 205 professional unions, 76 banks, 1,902 rural credit banks, 353 associations against livestock mortality and against fire and hail (including the Cattolica of Verona), and 87 workers’ funds were affiliated with the U.E.S. The U.E.S. was governed by a presidency (elective from 1911, from a list of three candidates to be submitted to the Pope, who chose and appointed the president); by a governing council; and by four secretariats: for professional organization, for cooperatives and agricultural institutions, for welfare institutions and the presidency, and for credit institutions, with their own sections in all the diocesan directorates. Under the Statutes of 1916, the secretariats were replaced by national federations, which had representatives on the General Council. With the reform of Benedict XV of 26 February 1915, the U.E.S. too was incorporated into the unification of Catholic Action.
The work of the U.E.S. was effective in every sector, succeeding in securing the solidarity of broad popular masses, especially agricultural ones, protecting the rights and interests of the working classes, while at the same time preventing the socialists’ work of Christianization; it stood up to their organizations, even in equality of action and in prestige before the State. In 1919 the U.E.S. was dissolved, transferring its tasks to new organizations: the Confederazione italiana dei lavoratori, the Confederazione cooperativa, and the Confederazione della mutualità e previdenza (called the white organizations), which divided the tasks among themselves, always drawing inspiration from Christian-social principles. To expound these principles, however, there remained, in addition to a special Segretariato economico sociale presso la Giunta direttiva, the Istituto cattolico di scienze sociali di Bergamo, founded, one might say, by Count Medolago Albani and authorized by Bl. Pio X to confer academic degrees in social sciences. The school, later an Istituto, admitted students with a secondary-school qualification; it comprised a two-year course of summer classes, with a third summer course of specialization qualifying students to pursue the degree. For many years it thus helped train leaders prepared for organization and propaganda (it ceased its activity only in the face of that of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart).