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Amid crimson theater drapes at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, declared this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was arranged to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 attack that took two lives and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Church of Norway – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the biggest religious group in Norway – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or from marrying in religious ceremonies. During the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 1993 and during 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to marry in church starting in 2017. In 2023, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with differing opinions. The leader of an organization for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “powerful and significant” but was delivered “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. Last year, the Anglican Church apologised for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, even as it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

Similarly, Ireland's Methodist Church last year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but held fast in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a bond between male and female.

Earlier this year, the United Church based in Canada issued an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”