🔗 Share this article

Amid deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“Norway's church has caused LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason I apologise today.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was arranged to take place after his statement.

The apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 attack that killed two people and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to no less than 30 years behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, preventing them from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. In the 1950s, church leaders characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships back in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners could get married in religious ceremonies since 2017. In 2023, the bishop took part in the Pride march in Oslo in what was described as a first for the church.

Thursday’s apology was met with a mixed reaction. The leader of an organization representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a dark chapter in the history of the church”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but had come “overdue for individuals who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it described as “shameful” actions, though it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Similarly, Ireland's Methodist Church the previous year issued an apology for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada offered an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a reaffirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

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