🔗 Share this article

Set against red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.

“The national church has caused LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This should never have happened and that is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to take place after his statement.

The statement of regret was delivered at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars involved in the 2022 attack that killed two people and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades in prison for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. Back in the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples could have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday elicited differing opinions. The leader of an organization of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “an important reparation” and a point in time that “represented the closure of a painful era within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the head of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but arrived “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have tried to offer apologies for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, England's church apologised for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, though it persists in refusing to permit gay marriages within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but held fast in its belief that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a confirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”