Church of Norway Issues Formal Apology to LGBTQ+ Community for ‘Harm, Shame and Suffering’

Amid deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

“The national church has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced on Thursday. “This should never have happened and this is why today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” led to a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

The apology took place at a venue called London Pub, one among two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to no less than 30 years in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Church of Norway – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, church leaders 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 legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to have church weddings since 2017. Last year, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday was met with a mixed reaction. The leader of an organization of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology was “strong and important” but arrived “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the crisis as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, a few churches have attempted to reconcile for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, England's church expressed regret for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, although it still declines to permit gay marriages within the church.

In a similar vein, 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 their families, but stayed firm in the view that marriage should only represent a partnership of one man and one woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church based in Canada issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a confirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”