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Amid red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to at least 30 years behind bars for the murders.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from joining the clergy or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, church leaders described gay people as “a worldwide social threat”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, becoming the second in the world to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, Norway's church commenced the ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples have been able to get married in religious ceremonies starting in 2017. During 2023, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with varied responses. The leader of an organization of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a difficult period within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but had come “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the disease as divine punishment”.

Internationally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but stayed firm in the view that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”