🔗 Share this article

Amid crimson theater drapes at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church offered an apology for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

“The national church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, declared on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was planned to come after the apology.

This formal apology took place at a venue called London Pub, one among two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, received a sentence to no less than 30 years behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. Back in the 1950s, bishops of the church referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, ranking as the second globally to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993 and during 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

During 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining gay pastors, and same-sex couples could have church weddings starting in 2017. During 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with varied responses. The head of a network of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, herself a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and a point in time that “finally marked the end of a dark chapter within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but arrived “too late for those among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts since the church viewed the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Anglican Church expressed regret for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, although it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year expressed regret for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their relatives, but held fast in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a bond between male and female.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, describing it as a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to honor and appreciate the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”