 Aragon was targeted in this way due to the broad-based support his movement enjoyed and the possibility that it could become a focus for wider resistance.The ideology of the UNS derived from the current of Catholic social thinking of the 1920s and 1930s, based on the papal encyclical "Rerum novarum" of Pope Leo XIII, which also influenced the regimes of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria, António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal and Francisco Franco in Spain.Taking its impetus from the same strand of rightist politics that had informed the Cristiada movement, the group sought to mobilise the peasantry against "atheistic and communist tendencies".