OSLO (Reuters) -The Church of Norway apologised on Thursday to the country’s LGBTQ+ community for decades of discrimination, acknowledging the institution had caused harm to gay people and thanking those who campaigned for change.
Presiding Bishop Olav Fykse Tveit delivered the apology at the London Pub in Oslo, a gay bar that was the site of a shooting in June 2022 in which two people were killed during the city’s Pride celebrations.
Speaking on behalf of Norway’s Bishops’ Conference, Tveit said the world is a better place when people are free to love who they want to.
“The church in Norway has imposed shame, great harm and pain… this should not have happened, and that is why I apologise today,” Tveit said.
The apology follows a 2022 acknowledgment by the church’s bishops that the institution had inflicted pain on LGBTQ+ people. In the 1950s, the Norwegian Bishops’ Conference described gay people as a “social danger of global dimensions”.
A church service was scheduled to follow the apology at the Oslo Cathedral on Thursday evening.
Today, same-sex couples can marry in ceremonies held by the Church of Norway, an Evangelical Lutheran church and the largest community of faith in the Nordic country.
The Church of England, central to 85 million Anglicans worldwide, apologised in January 2023 for “shameful” treatment of the LGBTQ+ community, though it maintained its refusal to allow same-sex marriages in churches. This week its bishops stopped plans to trial separate blessings for same-sex couples, although these can take place within routine church services.
(Reporting by Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen and Terje Solsvik in Oslo; Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
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