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Amid deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The national church has caused LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A worship service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to take place after his statement.

This formal apology occurred at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, church leaders characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to allow same-sex registered partnerships during 1993 and during 2009 the initial Nordic nation to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

Back in 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with a mixed reaction. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a difficult period within the church's past”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the head of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but had come “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the crisis as divine punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have sought to make amends for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Anglican Church apologised for what it described as “shameful” actions, even as it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Likewise, Ireland's Methodist Church last year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but stayed firm in its conviction that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing 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 celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people instead of seeking wholeness. We express our regret.”