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Against deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“The national church has caused LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, stated this Thursday. “This should never have happened and this is why today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” resulted in a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was planned to take place after his statement.

The apology took place at the London Pub, one of two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that took two lives and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was sentenced to no less than 30 years behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

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

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, Norway's church began ordaining gay pastors, and same-sex couples could marry in church starting in 2017. During 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with differing opinions. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a difficult period within the church's past”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the head of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but was delivered “not in time for those among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the disease as divine punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have tried to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, the Church of England expressed regret for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, though it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but held fast in its conviction that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

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

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”