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Amid deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway offered an apology for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared on Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to at least 30 years behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the biggest religious group in Norway – historically excluded the LGBTQ+ community, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, church leaders described gay people as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, Norway's church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples could marry in church from 2017 onward. In 2023, the bishop took part in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited varied responses. The head of a network of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, called it “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a painful era in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but arrived “overdue for individuals who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish because the church considered the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have attempted to offer apologies for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, England's church said sorry for what it described as “disgraceful” conduct, even as it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church in Ireland in the past year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but held fast in its conviction that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”