Catholic Church in Ghana Partners to Reach Out to Over 1,000 Civilians Fleeing Terrorist Attacks in Burkina Faso

“Believers living in areas where militant groups are active risk being kidnapped, displaced or worse. Christians have been targeted and killed and churches destroyed. Because of jihadist activity, hundreds of churches have been closed,” Open Doors has reported, adding that converts from Islam can face more general pressure. 

The report further indicates that “family and community members reject converts and attempt to force them to renounce their faith.” 

Some of Burkina Faso’s neighbours, including Niger and Mali, are experiencing extremism of their own, and Ghana, with its political stability, is a haven for those fleeing religious-based violence.

In his address, Bishop Kwasi said that Ghana has, over the past few years, been seeing a lot of “cross-border refugee inflows” of asylum seekers from Burkina Faso alone.

“Since 2022, more than 15,000 asylum seekers from Burkina Faso have entered northern Ghana, fleeing terrorist attacks in the Sahel,” the Bishop of Ghana’s Diocese of Sunyani said in his address at the Guest House of Damongo Catholic Diocese.

He added, “Our local communities, despite poverty, have shown heroic generosity with little external support. These realities remind us that peace cannot exist without justice, and security cannot endure without compassion.”

Bishop Kwasi spoke at length about the success stories of the Church in Ghana, and pointed out the areas in which the West African country is struggling.

He said that with the Church’s accompaniment, a joint mediation team, including chiefs from Ghana and Burkina Faso, had helped restore calm and facilitate the return of displaced families.

“The Church's pastoral accompaniment here is not theoretical advocacy; it is faith translated into healing action,” the GCBC President said.

He also noted that in areas marked by internal violence, the Church in Ghana had served as a bridge of reconciliation, especially through the SPI in partnership with the National Peace Council, regional authorities, and traditional leaders.

Through the partnerships, the Ghanaian Catholic Bishop said, GCBC members had helped to mediate conflicts between Doba and Kandiga in the country’s Upper East region.

Bishop Kwasi however decried Ghana’s “complex” sociopolitical reality, noting that while the country continues to be admired as a beacon of democracy and peace in West Africa, beneath the surface lies a reality marked by inequality, corruption, and recurring violence that threaten the society’s moral fibre.

He particularly pointed out Ghana’s politics and electoral tension saying that although the country has had four out of nine peaceful elections since 1992, the 2024 poll exposed “deep fractures” in the country’s political culture.

He said that independent observers had described Ghana’s 2024 elections as among the most violent over the years, adding, “Police reports confirmed 106 arrests linked to post-election disturbances, several deaths, and numerous injuries.”

The Local Ordinary of Sunyani Diocese since his Episcopal Consecration in June 2003 also decried environmental degradation and illegal mining, popularly known galamsey in Ghana, as a “scourge” that he said “continues to corrode both the land and the moral soul of our nation.”

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Highlighting the dangers of the practice, which entails illegal small-scale gold mining specific to Ghana, Bishop Kwasi said, “As of 2023, over 60 percent of Ghana's rivers and streams were polluted, thirty-four forest reserves compromised, and more than 4,700 hectares of forest destroyed. This devastation is not merely ecological. It is a moral and social tragedy.”

He said that the poor, especially women and children, are the ones who bear the heaviest burdens of poisoned water, infertile lands, and lost livelihoods, owing to environmental degradation.

The Ghanaian Church leader described environmental destruction as “a silent form of violence against the vulnerable” and “a sin against creation itself.”

The GCBC Plenary is being held on the theme, “Synodality in the Service of Justice and Peace in Ghana”.

In his address, the GCBC President said that the theme of this year’s GCBC Plenary Assembly builds on the one of November 2024, which was, “Jubilee Year: A Time to Proclaim Christ, Hope for the Church and Ghana.”

“If the Jubilee called us to proclaim Christ as our hope, synodality challenges us to embody that hope together, to listen, to discern, and to act as one body animated by the Holy Spirit. It reminds us that the Church is not an institution that commands from above but a pilgrim people who walk together, translating faith into works of justice and peace within our national context,” Bishop Kwasi said on November 10.