🔗 Share this article

Set against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway offered an apology for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has inflicted LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, declared on Thursday. “This should never have happened and that is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to come after the apology.

The statement of regret took place at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 shooting that killed two people and left nine seriously injured at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, denying them the opportunity from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, bishops of the church described gay people as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

Back in 2007, Norway's church started appointing homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples have been able to have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit participated in the Oslo Pride event in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday was met with differing opinions. The leader of an organization representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “finally marked the end of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but arrived “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish because the church considered the crisis as punishment from God”.

Internationally, a handful of religious institutions have sought to reconcile for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. Last year, the Church of England expressed regret for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, though it persists in refusing to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year apologised for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but stayed firm in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada offered an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, characterizing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to honor and appreciate the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”