🔗 Share this article

Against crimson theater drapes at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Norwegian Lutheran Church offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“The national church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals harm, suffering and humiliation,” the lead bishop, the church leader, declared on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and that is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” resulted in some to lose their faith, the bishop admitted. A church service at Oslo Cathedral was arranged to take place after his statement.

The apology took place at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that took two lives and caused serious injuries to nine at Oslo's Pride event. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to no less than 30 years behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, preventing them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, bishops of the church described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, Norway's church started appointing gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to have church weddings starting in 2017. Last year, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology received varied responses. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, referred to it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

For 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 lost their lives to AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the crisis to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, several faith-based organizations have attempted to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, the Anglican Church apologised for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, even as it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but held fast in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”