In a sweeping pastoral and public statement released Friday, April 10, the Ghana Catholic Bishops’ Conference (GCBC) pushed back firmly against recent remarks by President John Dramani Mahama and his Communications Minister, Hon. Felix Kwakye Ofosu, who suggested that the ongoing national debate on LGBTQ+ rights and family values is “not a major priority” and amounted to a “waste of time.”
The Bishops are having none of it.
“No question that touches the structure of human identity, family life, and social continuity can be trivial,” the Conference declared in its Statement, signed by Most Rev. Matthew Kwasi Gyamfi, Bishop of Sunyani and President of the GCBC. “Nations do not live by bread alone. They are sustained also by the invisible architecture of values.”
A Direct Challenge to the Presidency
President Mahama, speaking at the World Affairs Council, had described LGBTQ+ matters as “not the most important issue we face as a nation,” appearing to steer the national conversation back toward pressing economic challenges such as inflation, youth unemployment, and healthcare gaps.
Minister Kwakye Ofosu amplified that position, labelling the family values debate a distraction from bread-and-butter issues.
The Bishops acknowledged Ghana’s real economic pain — but rejected what they called a “false dichotomy between economics and ethics.”
“It is analytically unsound to frame a choice between economic progress and moral coherence,” the Statement asserted. “Empirical social research across contexts shows that stable family structures correlate with improved educational outcomes, reduced crime rates, and greater economic mobility. The family, in quiet ways, is a nation’s most efficient social welfare system.”
In plain language: fix the family, and you help fix the economy.
‘Two Lungs of a Just Society’
In one of the Statement’s most striking passages, the Bishops insisted that two principles must never be separated — what they described as “the two lungs by which a just society breathes.”
The first: the inviolable dignity of every human person. “No individual, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, may be subjected to violence, hatred, or unjust discrimination,” the Bishops declared unambiguously. “Such acts are moral failures and social wounds. We condemn them without reservation.”
The second: society’s legitimate responsibility to uphold the family, founded on the union of a man and a woman.
“To affirm dignity does not require the redefinition of marriage. To defend marriage does not require hostility,” the Bishops stated, carefully threading a line between compassion and conviction.
The Bishops and the Awaited Bill
The Statement takes particular aim at the unresolved fate of the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, which has passed through a lengthy and turbulent legislative journey.
The Bishops pointedly reminded President Mahama of his earlier public assurance that he would sign the Bill into law should Parliament duly pass it — and they want that promise honoured.
“Democratic integrity rests, in part, on the fidelity of leaders to their publicly stated commitments,” the Statement warned, in what many observers will read as an unusually direct political caution from the Church.
The Bishops also acknowledged that portions of the Bill have attracted legitimate concerns and called for careful legislative scrutiny and refinement “where necessary,” so that the final law reflects both Ghanaian moral convictions and constitutional guarantees of human dignity.
A Nation at a Crossroads
Describing Ghana as standing “at a delicate intersection where economic aspiration meets moral self-definition,” the Bishops called on the Executive, Parliament, religious leaders, traditional authorities, and civil society to engage in dialogue marked by “intellectual seriousness, mutual respect, and moral clarity.”
“The tone of our discourse matters as much as its content,” they warned. “Words can either build a republic of trust or fracture it into suspicion.”
The Statement closed with a prayer for the nation, entrusting Ghana to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph, “guardians of the Holy Family and patrons of faithful stewardship.”
The Conference’s voice, pastoral yet pointed, arrives at a moment of heightened national tension — and is unlikely to be dismissed quietly.
The full text of the Bishops’ statement is available at the GCBC Secretariat and online
