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Against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

“The national church has brought LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A worship service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to come after the apology.

The statement of regret was delivered at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars attacked during the 2022 shooting that killed two people and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the most extensive faith community in the country – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, ranking as the second globally to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to approve gay marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to have church weddings since 2017. In 2023, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called a first for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received a mixed reaction. The head of a network of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and a point in time that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but was delivered “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … with deep sorrow in their hearts since the church viewed the crisis as divine punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have tried to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, England's church expressed regret for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, though it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but held fast in the view that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church based in Canada offered an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, characterizing it as a confirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We did not manage to honor and appreciate the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”