🔗 Share this article

Against red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church offered an apology for discrimination and harm caused by the church.

“Norway's church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, announced during a Thursday event. “This should never have happened and which is the reason I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” resulted in some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 attack 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 in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals 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 by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples were permitted to have church weddings starting in 2017. Last year, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was described as a first for the church.

Thursday’s apology received a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a significant step toward healing” and a moment that “finally marked the end of a painful era in the history of the church”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “strong and important” but had come “not in time for those among us who died of Aids … with hearts filled with anguish because the church considered the crisis as punishment from God”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to make amends for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Anglican Church expressed regret for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, though it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but stayed firm in its belief that marriage could only be a bond between male and female.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We did not manage to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”