🔗 Share this article

Against deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Church of Norway offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” the lead bishop, Bishop Tveit, declared this Thursday. “This should never have happened and this is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was planned to take place after his statement.

The statement of regret was delivered at a venue called London Pub, one of two bars involved in the 2022 attack that killed two people and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and during 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, Norway's church began ordaining homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to marry in church from 2017 onward. In 2023, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

The apology on Thursday received differing opinions. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, referred to it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a painful era in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “strong and important” but arrived “overdue for individuals who lost their lives to AIDS … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have tried to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it described as “shameful” actions, although it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland in the past year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their relatives, but held fast in its conviction that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We caused pain to people instead of seeking wholeness. We are sorry.”