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Set against red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

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

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused some to lose their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was arranged to come after the apology.

This formal apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 attack that took two lives and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, becoming the second in the world to allow same-sex registered partnerships during 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies from 2017 onward. In 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with varied responses. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, herself a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a dark chapter in the history of the church”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “strong and important” but had come “not in time for those among us who died of Aids … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for historical treatment towards LGBTQ+ people. During 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it characterized as its “shameful” treatment, though it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Likewise, Ireland's Methodist Church the previous year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but stayed firm in its conviction that marriage could only be a bond between male and female.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have failed to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, stated. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We are sorry.”