🔗 Share this article

Set against deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has brought LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, declared this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason I apologise today.”

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

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and caused serious injuries to nine during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to no less than 30 years in incarceration for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, the church’s bishops described gay people as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and during 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, Norway's church began ordaining homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to have church weddings starting in 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called a first for the church.

Thursday’s apology was met with a mixed reaction. The head of a network of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, who is also a gay pastor, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a painful era in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but had come “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have attempted to make amends for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, England's church expressed regret for what it characterized as “disgraceful” conduct, although it continues to refuse to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and family members, but stayed firm in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a confirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all 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,” Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”