🔗 Share this article

Set against red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has caused LGBTQ+ individuals harm, suffering and humiliation,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared this Thursday. “This should never have happened 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 church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to come after the apology.

The apology occurred at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 violent incident that killed two people and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to at least 30 years in incarceration for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, denying them the opportunity from serving as pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, becoming the second in the world to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, Norway's church started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and LGBTQ+ partners could marry in church since 2017. In 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday elicited a mixed reaction. The head of a network of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “an important reparation” and a point in time that “finally marked the end of a painful era within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but had come “not in time for those among us who died of Aids … with hearts filled with anguish because the church considered the disease as divine punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have sought to make amends for their past behavior towards LGBTQ+ people. During 2023, England's church apologised for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, even as it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in church.

Similarly, Ireland's Methodist Church in the past year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but stayed firm in the view that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada offered an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”