Let’s Be “actively engaged in safeguarding creation”: Catholic Bishop in Ghana Urges Inclusive Debate on Climate Change

Sekondi-Takoradi, 06 July, 2025 / 11:54 PM

God’s creation and His plans for it needs to be safeguarded, Bishop  John Baptist Attakruh of Ghana’s Catholic Diocese of Sekondi-Takoradi has said. 

In a July 3 lecture that was part of Centenary celebrations of the Knights and Ladies of Marshall, Bishop Attakruh emphasized the need for all citizens of the globe to be “actively engaged” in protecting what God has put into being as “a sign of our respect for God's plan of creation.”

He denounced far-reaching damage to the planet earth, with ordinary people bearing the brunt. He said, “Whether we acknowledge it or not, the effects of climate change affect all of us.”

“In fact, the effects are borne by the most vulnerable people at home and around the world,” Bishop Attakruh said on the first of the two-day 2025 Marshall Moreau Murat memorial lectures realized at Our Lady Star of the Sea Cathedral of his Metropolitan See. 

For him, “The debate on global warming and climate change can no longer be relegated to environmentalists, economists, or politicians alone.”

“We all need to understand the phenomenon of global warming and climate change and be actively involved or engaged in safeguarding creation,” he emphasized during his July 3 lecture, which he based on the late Pope Francis’ May 2015 Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home, Laudato Si’. 

He described the 10-year-old Encyclical Letter as one “on human and natural ecology” through which the late Pontiff “made clear that our care for one another and our care for the earth are intimately bound together, and that climate change is one of the principal challenges facing humanity and the global community in our times.”

Climate change “is about our stewardship of God's creation. It is about our responsibility to those who come after us,” Bishop Attakruh said during the two-day 2025 Marshall Moreau Murat memorial lectures organized under the theme, “The Call to All People of Goodwill on the Climate Crisis in View of the ‘Laudate Deum’ The Marshallan”.

He told participants that at “the very core, climate change is about God's creation and the one human family.”

The 67-year-old Catholic Bishop went on to acknowledge the Church’s “distinctive” contribution to the debate on the global environmental crisis.

“The Catholic Church brings a very distinctive perspective to the debate on climate change,” he said, noting the input “in recent times by successive Popes, Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, all of blessed memory, and even Pope Leo XIV”.

These leaders at the helm of the Catholic Church, he said “have shown great interest in the debate on climate change and they have contributed immensely to it. Their distinctive perspective has lifted up the moral dimensions of the issue of global warming and climate change.”

Bishop Attakruh urged participants at the two-day event that concluded on July 4 to take advantage of the lectures and turn their attention to the invaluable contributions of the Holy Fathers “to the debate on climate change and global warming.”

“We will also have the opportunity to listen to their clarion call to all men and women of goodwill to act now and to act decisively to reverse the course of global warming and climate change,” said the Ghanaian Catholic Bishop, who has been at the helm of Sekondi-Takoradi Diocese since his Episcopal Consecration in September 2021. 

He continued, “As Catholics, our faith calls us to care for all, in fact, to care for all of God's creation, especially the very least among them. Our response to global climate change and global warming should be a sign of our respect for God's plan of creation.”

“As people of faith, we are convinced that the earth indeed is the Lord's and all it contains,” Bishop Attakruh said citing Psalm 24:1, and added, “Our Creator has given us the gift of creation—the air we breathe, the water that sustains life, the fruits of the land that nourish us, and the entire world without which human life cannot flourish,” Bishop Attakruh in his July 3 lecture.