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Amid deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.

“The national church has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at Oslo's main cathedral was arranged to take place after his statement.

The apology occurred at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Church of Norway – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised the LGBTQ+ community, denying them the opportunity from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, becoming the second in the world to allow same-sex registered partnerships back in 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway commenced the ordination of gay pastors, and gay and lesbian couples could marry in church starting in 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was described as a first for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with a mixed reaction. The leader of an organization for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and a point in time that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but arrived “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Internationally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, the Anglican Church expressed regret for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, even as it continues to refuse to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but held fast in its conviction that marriage should only represent a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, describing it as a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”