SOCIAL ECONOMIC UNION. – An 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 Action of the Opera dei Congressi (q.v.). Presided over by Count Stanislao Medolago Albani (q.v.), in 1906 it was constituted as the U.E.S., holding its first assembly on 5 March 1907.
The tasks assigned to the U.E.S. by Blessed Pius X, through a brief, were: to coordinate and direct, for economic-social activity, the diocesan meetings of Catholic Action; to promote professional unions among workers, coordinating their activity; to unite the care of material interests with higher aims of education and culture. By around 1911, 353 propaganda associations, 36 people’s secretariats, 1,056 mutual aid societies, 242 cooperatives, 205 professional unions, 76 banks, 1,902 rural savings banks, 353 associations against livestock mortality and against fires and hail (including the Cattolica of Verona), and 87 workers’ savings banks adhered to the U.E.S. The U.E.S. was governed by a presidency (elective from 1911 by a slate of three candidates to be presented to the Pope, who chose and appointed the president); a directive council; and four secretariats: for professional organization, for cooperatives and agricultural institutes, for assistance and presidency institutes, and for credit institutes, with their own sections in all diocesan directions. The secretariats were replaced in 1916 by national federations, which had representation in the General Council. With the reform of Benedict XV on 26 February 1915, the U.E.S. was also integrated into the unification of Catholic Action.
The work of the U.E.S. was effective in every sector, succeeding in securing the solidarity of vast popular masses, especially agricultural ones, in safeguarding the rights and interests of the working classes, while at the same time preventing the disorganizing efforts of the socialists, to whose organizations it stood opposed, both in terms of action and prestige before the State. In 1919 the U.E.S. dissolved, ceding its tasks to new organizations: the Italian Confederation of Workers, the Confederation of Cooperatives, and the Confederation of Mutual Aid and Social Welfare (the so-called “white” confederations), which divided the tasks among themselves, always inspired by Christian-social principles. To illustrate these principles, however, there remained, in addition to a special Social Economic Secretariat within the Directive Board, the Catholic Institute of Social Sciences in Bergamo, founded, one might say, by Count Medolago Albani and authorized by Blessed Pius X to confer academic degrees in social sciences. The school, later an institute, admitted students with a secondary school diploma; it included a two-year cycle of summer courses with a third summer course for advanced study leading to a degree. For many years it thus contributed (ceasing its activity only with the establishment of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart) to training leaders prepared for organization and propaganda.