🔗 Share this article

Amid deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Church of Norway expressed regret for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The national church has brought LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared on Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was arranged to take place after his statement.

The apology occurred at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars attacked during the 2022 shooting that took two lives and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples back in 1993 and by 2009 the first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, Norway's church started appointing gay pastors, and gay and lesbian couples could have church weddings since 2017. Last year, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with a mixed reaction. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “finally marked the end 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 statement was “strong and important” but had come “too late for those among us who died of Aids … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have attempted to make amends for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. Last year, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it described as “shameful” actions, though it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their families, but held fast in its belief 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, labeling it a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We did not manage to honor and appreciate all of your beautiful creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”