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Set against red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church expressed regret for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has brought the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” the lead bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was planned to come after the apology.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub, one of two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that took two lives and left nine seriously injured at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in prison for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, church leaders described gay people as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and during 2009 the initial Nordic nation to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to have church weddings since 2017. During 2023, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday received varied responses. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a dark chapter in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but had come “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts because the church considered the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to offer apologies for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, England's church apologised for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance 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.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a confirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have failed to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”