🔗 Share this article

Amid crimson theater drapes at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

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

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

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 shooting that killed two people and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for the murders.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Church of Norway – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or to marry in church. During the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

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

Back in 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies since 2017. During 2023, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The apology on Thursday was met with differing opinions. The leader of an organization of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and a point in time that “finally marked the end of a painful era within the church's past”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the leader of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “meaningful and vital” but had come “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Internationally, a few churches have attempted to offer apologies for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Anglican Church apologised for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, though it still declines to permit gay marriages in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but held fast in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a partnership of one man and one woman.

Earlier this year, Canada's United Church issued an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in all of your beautiful creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We have hurt individuals instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”