🔗 Share this article

Amid deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Norwegian Lutheran Church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the lead bishop, the church leader, announced on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and that is why I offer my apology now.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to come after the apology.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and caused serious injuries to nine at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to at least 30 years behind bars for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, denying them the opportunity to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. Back in the 1950s, the church’s bishops characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

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

In 2007, Norway's church started appointing homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples could get married in religious ceremonies starting in 2017. In 2023, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited varied responses. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but had come “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … carrying heavy hearts since the church viewed the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have sought to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, the Church of England said sorry for what it described as “disgraceful” conduct, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year apologised for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their families, but stayed firm in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a bond between male and female.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church offered an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a confirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”