The Norwegian Church Issues Sincere Apology to LGBTQ+ Individuals for ‘Pain, Shame and Significant Harm’

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

“The national church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, 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, Tveit recognized. A church service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to come after the apology.

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub, one of two bars involved in the 2022 attack that took two lives and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to at least 30 years in prison for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to get married in religious ceremonies since 2017. Last year, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a first for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received varied responses. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era in the history of the church”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but arrived “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the crisis as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, a few churches have sought to reconcile for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. During 2023, the Anglican Church apologised for what it described as “shameful” actions, even as it continues to refuse to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but held fast in the view that matrimony must only constitute a partnership of one man and one woman.

Earlier this year, Canada's United Church issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, stated. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”