🔗 Share this article

Amid deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Norwegian Lutheran Church offered an apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, the church leader, announced during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was arranged to follow his apology.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub, one of two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that resulted in two deaths and caused serious injuries to nine during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

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 initial Nordic nation to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church commenced the ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples could have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a painful era within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “strong and important” but arrived “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have sought to offer apologies for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, England's church apologised for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, even as it continues to refuse to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but remained staunch in the view that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church based in Canada issued an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, 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 honor and appreciate the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, stated. “We have hurt individuals instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”