🔗 Share this article

Amid red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to some to lose their faith, the bishop admitted. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to follow his apology.

The statement of regret occurred at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that killed two people and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was given a prison term to at least 30 years in prison for carrying out the attacks.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the biggest religious group in Norway – historically excluded LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. In the 1950s, church leaders described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples back in 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples have been able to marry in church since 2017. Last year, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday received varied responses. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “an important reparation” and a point in time that “finally marked the end of a dark chapter in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “strong and important” but was delivered “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts since the church viewed the crisis as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, a few churches have attempted to offer apologies for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, the Church of England said sorry for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, though it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Similarly, Ireland's Methodist Church last year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but stayed firm in its belief that marriage could only be 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” in all aspects of church life.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”