ECONOMIC SOCIAL UNION. - Italian Catholic institution, coordinator of many economic and social works among Italian Catholics, arisen 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 (v.). Presided over by Count Stanislao 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. Pius X, with a brief of his, were: to coordinate and direct, for socio-economic 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. Around 1911, 353 propaganda associations, 26 people's secretariats, 1055 mutual aid societies, 242 cooperatives, 205 professional unions, 76 banks, 1902 rural banks, 353 associations against livestock mortality and against fire and hail (among them the Cattolica of Verona), and 87 workers' banks adhered to the U.E.S. The U.E.S. was governed by a presidency (elective from 1911, from a slate of three to be presented to the Pope, who chose and appointed the president); by a directing council; by four secretariats: for professional organization, for cooperatives and agricultural institutes, for assistance and welfare institutes, for credit institutes, with their own sections in all diocesan directorates. With the Statute 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 fitted 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 protecting the rights and interests of the working classes, while at the same time preventing the Christianization work of the socialists, whose organizations it stood up to, also in parity of action and in prestige before the State. In 1919 the U.E.S. dissolved, ceding its tasks to new organizations: the Italian Confederation of Workers, the Cooperative Confederation, the Confederation of Mutuality and Welfare (known as white), which divided the tasks among themselves, always inspired by Christian-social principles. To illustrate these principles there remained, however, besides a special Socio-Economic Secretariat at the Directing Junta, the Catholic Institute of Social Sciences of Bergamo, founded, one might say, by Count Medolago Albani, and authorized by Bl. Pius X to confer academic degrees in social sciences. The school, later Institute, admitted students with a secondary education qualification; it comprised a two-year cycle of summer courses with a third summer refresher course to proceed to the degree. It thus contributed for many years (it ceased its activity only in the face of that of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart) to training leaders, prepared for organization and propaganda.
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Giuseppe Palazzini