🔗 Share this article

Set against crimson theater drapes at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Norwegian Lutheran Church expressed regret for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The national church has inflicted LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and that is why today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused a loss of faith for some, the bishop admitted. A church service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to come after the apology.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and left nine seriously injured at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was given a prison term to no less than 30 years in prison for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, ranking as the second globally to allow same-sex registered partnerships back in 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners could 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 received varied responses. The head of a network representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era in the church’s history”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “powerful and significant” but arrived “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, a few churches have sought to make amends for historical treatment regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, the Church of England expressed regret for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, even as it continues to refuse to permit gay marriages within the church.

Likewise, Ireland's Methodist Church last year apologised for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

Several months ago, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”