ITALIAN CATHOLIC ELECTORAL UNION. - An organization established after the suppression of the Opera dei Congressi (v.) on the basis of the encyclical Il fermo proposito (11 June 1905) and the tempering of the Non expedit (v.), for the purpose of coordinating and directing Italian Catholic forces in electoral contests, in which they were called to take an active part.
These aims were set forth in the first programmatic circular of 15 Aug. 1906, which consequently recommended, with intense propaganda, electoral registrations among Catholics (1907).
The U.E.C.I., which in 1911 counted 177 associations and had its own representatives in every diocese, besides the various administrative elections, also directed the political ones, where dispensation from voting was granted, while the Non expedit was still in force, in 1906, 1909, and 1913. In the general political elections of 1909 it set out the programmatic points to which the permission for Catholics to go to the polls and their vote for candidates was to be subordinated; these programmatic points were refined in the elections of 1913 and brought to seven postulates: this constituted the so-called Gentiloni Pact (v.). Furthermore, in 1912 the U.E.C.I. declared itself in favor of universal suffrage. Its work met with a most remarkable success. In the elections of 1909, 24 Catholic candidates were elected; in those of 1913 they came forward with 35 candidates, deciding, by unanimous acknowledgment, the salvation of the nation from subversive forces.
The presidents of the U.E.C.I. were Filippo Tolli (1906-10), Ottorino Gentiloni (1910-16), Carlo Santucci (1916-18), Giorgio Montini (1918-19). When in 1919, freedom of initiative in the political field having been left to Italian Catholics, the Popular Party (v.) arose, the U.E.C.I. dissolved and passed on to the Popular Union (v.) the direction of what moral and religious problems required of Catholics.
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Giuseppe Palazzini