🔗 Share this article

Set against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has brought the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated on Thursday. “This should never have happened and which is the reason I offer my apology now.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to follow his apology.

The statement of regret occurred at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 attack that took two lives and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, the Church of Norway – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, bishops of the church referred to homosexual individuals as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, emerging as the world's second to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

In 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church commenced the ordination of homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to marry in church from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a difficult period within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but had come “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … carrying heavy hearts as the church regarded the crisis as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have tried to offer apologies for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, even as it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Likewise, Ireland's Methodist Church in the past year expressed regret for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We did not manage to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We express our regret.”