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Fr. Seamus Finn among Presenters at the Rome Roundtable 2017 January 18th, 2017
The Global Foundation gathered for its Rome Roundtable 2017 on January 14th and 15th
and convened participants from the business and investment community, religious leaders, civic institutions, academia and civil society to evaluate responses and measure progress on United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
The fifty invited participants were asked to report on progress since the last roundtable and to discuss additional commitments and actions that they would undertake during the coming year.
Visit this website to read the Vatican Radio report on the event and Pope Francis’s address to participants.
My comments were focused on the numerous challenges and debates that have taken place over the last century about development. The UN sponsored decades of development that focused on different dimensions of the topic and how they might be appropriately addressed and then the encyclical letter, “Populorum Progressio” (On the Development of Peoples), of Pope Paul VI, in 1967 built on the teaching of the Catholics tradition and the Second Vatican Council on the issues. This encyclical remains as a foundational point of reference for the Church’s understanding of development especially with the introduction and definition of the concept of “integral human development”. More recently through a United Nations process in 2000, the Millennium Development Goals were adopted as a benchmark and guide for action in countries and communities across the world.
The adoption of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals by the General Assembly in 2015 has set a clear agenda for the work of development until 2030. In our panel presentation my colleagues, Mark Cutefani, CEO, Anglo American and Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, Anglican Archbishop of Cape town reported on the collaborative multistakeholder project that has been organized by the Mining and Faiths Reflection Initiative to address development issues in mine site communities at local and regional levels.
