🔗 Share this article

Against deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Norwegian Lutheran Church expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“The national church has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community pain, shame and significant harm,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This should never have happened and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to come after the apology.

The apology took place at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 shooting that killed two people and caused serious injuries to nine during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Church of Norway – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to allow same-sex registered partnerships back in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church commenced the ordination of homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples have been able to marry in church from 2017 onward. Last year, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called a first for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited differing opinions. The leader of an organization for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, who is also a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but had come “not in time for those among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts as the church regarded the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have sought to make amends for their past behavior towards LGBTQ+ people. During 2023, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but held fast in the view that marriage should only represent a bond between male and female.

Earlier this year, the United Church based in Canada offered an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing it as a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We did not manage to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We caused pain to people instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”