🔗 Share this article

Set against crimson theater drapes at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Church of Norway offered an apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The national church has caused the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated on Thursday. “This should never have happened and this is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to take place after his statement.

The statement of regret occurred at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 shooting that took two lives and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or from marrying in religious ceremonies. Back in the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

In 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to marry in church from 2017 onward. In 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday received varied responses. The leader of an organization of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a dark chapter in the history of the church”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but arrived “too late for those among us who died of Aids … with deep sorrow in their hearts since the church viewed the disease as divine punishment”.

Globally, several faith-based organizations have attempted to offer apologies for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, the Church of England said sorry for what it described as “shameful” actions, even as it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

Likewise, Ireland's Methodist Church the previous year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but stayed firm in the view that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

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

“We have failed to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people instead of seeking wholeness. We express our regret.”