Church of Norway Delivers Formal Apology to LGBTQ+ Individuals for ‘Shame, Great Harm and Pain’

Amid red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared during a Thursday event. “This should never have happened and which is the reason I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused some to lose their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to take place after his statement.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that took two lives and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to at least 30 years behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them to become pastors or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

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 in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples could get married in religious ceremonies starting in 2017. Last year, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with varied responses. The head of a network of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, referred to it as “an important reparation” and a point in time that “signaled the conclusion of a difficult period within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the head of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but arrived “too late for those among us who died of Aids … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the disease as punishment from God”.

Globally, several faith-based organizations have attempted to make amends for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, England's church apologised for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, though it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland in the past year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but held fast in the view that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, describing it as a confirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We did not manage to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We have hurt individuals instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”