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Against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway offered an apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has brought LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I offer my apology now.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to a loss of faith for some, the bishop admitted. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to take place after his statement.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars attacked during the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. Back in the 1950s, church leaders characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

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

In 2007, Norway's church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples could marry in church from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology was met with a mixed reaction. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but was delivered “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … carrying heavy hearts as the church regarded the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to reconcile for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, although it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church in Ireland in the past year expressed regret for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but remained staunch in its belief that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a renewed commitment of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have failed to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”