🔗 Share this article

Amid red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Norwegian Lutheran Church expressed regret for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” resulted in some to lose their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to take place after his statement.

The apology occurred at the London Pub, one of two bars involved in the 2022 attack that took two lives and left nine seriously injured at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, the Church of Norway – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, denying them the opportunity from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships back in 1993 and by 2009 the first Scandinavian country to legalize same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies from 2017 onward. In 2023, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday elicited differing opinions. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “finally marked the end of a painful era in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the head of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but had come “too late for those among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts as the church regarded the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to offer apologies for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, England's church apologised for what it characterized as its “shameful” treatment, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their relatives, but held fast in the view that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church based in Canada issued an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We express our regret.”