🔗 Share this article

Against deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

“Norway's church has caused LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, announced during a Thursday event. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I offer my apology now.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” led to a loss of faith for some, Tveit recognized. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to come after the apology.

The apology occurred at the London Pub, one of two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that took two lives and left nine seriously injured at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a worldwide social threat”.

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

In 2007, Norway's church started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to marry in church since 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited differing opinions. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “powerful and significant” but arrived “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the crisis as punishment from God”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have sought to make amends for historical treatment towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, England's church expressed regret for what it described as “shameful” actions, though it persists in refusing to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and family members, but held fast in the view that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in all of your beautiful creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We express our regret.”