🔗 Share this article

Amid crimson theater drapes at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Church of Norway issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has caused LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” the lead bishop, Bishop Tveit, declared this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I offer my apology now.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” led to some to lose their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to come after the apology.

The apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was given a prison term to no less than 30 years in incarceration for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them 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”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples were permitted to marry in church starting in 2017. During 2023, the bishop took part in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday received a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “an important reparation” and a point in time that “represented the closure of a dark chapter in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “strong and important” but was delivered “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the disease as punishment from God”.

Globally, several faith-based organizations have tried to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, England's church said sorry for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, though it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland in the past year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but remained staunch in the view that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret 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 rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”