Norway's Church Makes Sincere Apology to LGBTQ+ Individuals for ‘Pain, Shame and Significant Harm’
Set against red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.
“The church in Norway has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This should never have happened and this is why I apologise today.”
The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to come after the apology.
The apology occurred at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that killed two people and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.
In common with various worldwide religions, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. Back in the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.
But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships during 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.
Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples were permitted to marry in church starting in 2017. Last year, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.
The apology on Thursday was met with a mixed reaction. The head of a network of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, referred to it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a dark chapter within the church's past”.
As stated by Stephen Adom, the head of the Norwegian 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 deep sorrow in their hearts since the church viewed the crisis as divine punishment”.
Worldwide, several faith-based organizations have attempted to make amends for their past behavior towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, the Anglican Church apologised for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, although it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.
In a similar vein, Ireland's Methodist Church the previous year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but remained staunch in the view that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.
In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a confirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.
“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, stated. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”