🔗 Share this article

Set against crimson theater drapes at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church expressed regret for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has caused LGBTQ+ people pain, shame and significant harm,” the lead bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This should never have happened and this is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A worship service at Oslo's main cathedral was planned to follow his apology.

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to no less than 30 years in prison for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Church of Norway – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the biggest religious group in Norway – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. During the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, becoming the second in the world to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to approve gay marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to marry in church starting in 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

Thursday’s apology was met with differing opinions. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a difficult period within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but had come “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, several faith-based organizations have tried to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, the Church of England expressed regret for what it characterized as its “shameful” treatment, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

Likewise, Ireland's Methodist Church last year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but held fast in its conviction that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, describing it as a reaffirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”