🔗 Share this article

Amid crimson theater drapes at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Norwegian Lutheran Church offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has brought LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, announced this Thursday. “This should never have happened and which is the reason I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A church service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to come after the apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that killed two people and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades in prison for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, denying them the opportunity from joining the clergy or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, bishops of the church described gay people as “a worldwide social threat”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, becoming the second in the world to allow same-sex registered partnerships during 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing gay pastors, and gay and lesbian couples have been able to marry in church starting in 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday elicited varied responses. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, referred to it as “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “strong and important” but arrived “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts because the church considered the crisis as punishment from God”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to make amends for historical treatment towards LGBTQ+ people. Last year, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year expressed regret for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but remained staunch in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church offered an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, characterizing it as a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We have failed to honor and appreciate all of your beautiful creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We have hurt individuals rather than pursuing healing. We are sorry.”