🔗 Share this article

Amid red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway issued a formal apology for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has brought the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared on Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I apologise today.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit recognized. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars attacked during the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

In common with various worldwide religions, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, denying them the opportunity from joining the clergy or from marrying in religious ceremonies. During the 1950s, church leaders characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 1993 and in 2009 the initial Nordic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples have been able to get married in religious ceremonies starting in 2017. During 2023, the bishop took part in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a first for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a painful era within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “strong and important” but had come “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Globally, several faith-based organizations have tried to offer apologies for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. Last year, the Church of England expressed regret for what it described as “shameful” actions, even as it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, Ireland's Methodist Church in the past year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage should only represent a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada issued an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”