🔗 Share this article

Amid deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church offered an apology for hurtful actions and exclusion perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, stated on Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused some to lose their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at Oslo's main cathedral was planned to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 shooting that killed two people and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, received a sentence to at least 30 years behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the most extensive faith community in the country – historically excluded the LGBTQ+ community, denying them the opportunity to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, ranking as the second globally to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

In 2007, the Church of Norway commenced the ordination of homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples have been able to get married in religious ceremonies from 2017 onward. Last year, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology was met with a mixed reaction. The leader of an organization representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era in the history of the church”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “powerful and significant” but had come “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the crisis as punishment from God”.

Globally, a few churches have sought to offer apologies for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Church of England expressed regret for what it described as “shameful” actions, although it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

Likewise, Ireland's Methodist Church the previous year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but stayed firm in its conviction that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”