🔗 Share this article

Against deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has caused the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, declared on Thursday. “This should never have happened and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

The statement of regret occurred at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 violent incident that killed two people and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, denying them the opportunity from serving as pastors or to marry in church. During the 1950s, the church’s bishops characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, ranking as the second globally to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993 and during 2009 the first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, Norway's church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to have church weddings since 2017. In 2023, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited varied responses. The leader of an organization for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a painful era within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but arrived “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts since the church viewed the crisis as punishment from God”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have sought to offer apologies for historical treatment regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it characterized as “disgraceful” conduct, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church in Ireland in the past year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their families, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage could only be a bond between male and female.

Several months ago, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We have wounded people instead of seeking wholeness. We are sorry.”