The Sustainable Development Goals (2015-2030), also known by their acronym SDGs, are an initiative promoted by the United Nations. The overall objective is to achieve a more equal and healthy world. It is specified in 17 goals to which it is not easy to put a catch: end poverty in all its forms worldwide, promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all, reduce inequality in and between countries... In Spain this 2030 agenda even has its own ministry that depends on the second vice-presidency of Pablo Iglesias.
One of the lines of action to achieve the goals of the 2030 Agenda is precisely education. Therefore, it is not strange that also when it comes to developing the new curriculum of Religion at this time of implementation of the LOMLOE, the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda are present as a horizon of dialogue and encounter between the ministerial proposals and the contributions of School Religious Education.
The Developmental Objectives need to be examined closely in order to see how to properly incorporate them into the development of the Religion curriculum.
How to assess this convergence of the SDGs and the religious education curriculum? In this case I believe that St. Paul's wise counsel to the Thessalonian community is applicableExamine everything carefully and keep the good things.(1 Thess 5:21) It is evident that in many of these objectives we can agree and have a constructive collaboration. There are undoubtedly good things we can keep, to paraphrase the apostle. But, also following his teachings, we have to examine everything carefully in order to see how to incorporate them correctly into the development of the Religion curriculum.
The first point I would highlight in this discernment is that, being convergent in some of their objectives, school religious education has its own purpose. And this marks the way in which these objectives could be incorporated into the Religion class curriculum.
As Carlos Esteban recalled in the Forum 'Towards a new Religion curriculum'. The three aims that the Church in Spain indicated for ERE in the document 'Pastoral Orientations on School Religious Education (1979) are surprisingly topical:
- That the student is lucidly positioned before the cultural tradition.
- That the student is critically inserted in society.
- That the student can find answers to the ultimate meaning of life and its ethical implications.
These three objectives are dimensions of the Christian worldview that the Religion class should bring to the students. This global, internalized vision of Christianity, which the student integrates into his or her own life as a key competency, is the basis of all Catholic education. Also of the Religion class.
It is in this critical insertion into society that we can consider this dialogue on the SDGs and their application in the 2030 Agenda. It is a dialogue that faith must assume with the culture of each time, but it can only do so in an enriching way to the extent that it starts from its own Catholic identity, which helps it to do so in a critical way. Without this identity, the risk is to dilute and confuse the objective, turning school religious education and Catholic education in general into an uncritical support to the 2030 agenda.
It is not a question of looking askance or suspiciously, much less defensively, at the society in which we live. We need a curriculum in dialogue with society, embedded in the school pedagogy, capable of responding to the challenges presented by today's education. But all of this starts from the fact that the curriculum really serves to give our students the keys to Catholic identity.
And in this sense, Christian anthropology provides some keys that, we should not be afraid to say, do not coincide in essential aspects with those that can be proposed from other ideological instances. The person, man and woman, created in the image of God, open to transcendence, capable of good, wounded by sin, in need of redemption, resurrected, with Christ as a model of humanity... is our point of reference, which can illuminate in a special way the concrete life of our students.
We must teach how to face the challenges facing society and do so from the perspective of Christian humanism.
On the other hand, the SDGs and the 2030 agenda have, as is often the case in this type of document, a breadth of objectives that allow for different readings and realizations. The goal can be fine or ambiguous. But the way in which it is achieved, the means, must be put on the table.
The objective 5.6, for example, of '.ensuring universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights'.The fact is that, uncritically assumed, it could lead us to support measures contrary to Christian morality, which one can easily intuit. Undoubtedly, Christians have a lot to say, and we must say it, about how to achieve the goals of the 2030 agenda. And so we must teach our students. But with that dose of critical vision that the bishops recommended in 1979 and which, in today's liquid world, is especially necessary. We simply have to teach them to face the challenges facing society and which are included, in part, in the 2030 agenda, and to do so from the perspective of Christian humanism.
In the SDGs we will find points of encounter and dialogue. And it is good that, as the apostle of the Gentiles did in Athens, we establish this dialogue. We should be aware that when we speak of the resurrection of the dead, when we propose a transcendent vision to an immanent society, we may also be told that this is what they will hear us speak about at another time. Like Paul, in Corinth, we will then discover that the cross is always a scandal or stupidity for one or the other. But it is always the key to life and to the interpretation of reality for a Christian.
