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Against red stage curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway offered an apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” resulted in a loss of faith for some, Tveit recognized. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Church of Norway – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or to marry in church. In the 1950s, bishops of the church described gay people as “a worldwide social threat”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, becoming the second in the world to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, Norway's church started appointing gay pastors, and same-sex couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies since 2017. Last year, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday was met with varied responses. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “strong and important” but arrived “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, the Anglican Church apologised for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, although it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year expressed regret for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but held fast in its conviction that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We have not succeeded to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”