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Against red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, announced during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I offer my apology now.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” led to a loss of faith for some, the bishop admitted. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to come after the apology.

The statement of regret occurred at a venue called London Pub, one of two bars targeted in the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and left nine seriously injured at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or from marrying in religious ceremonies. Back in the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, becoming the second in the world to legalize same-sex partnerships during 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

During 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to marry in church starting in 2017. Last year, Tveit participated in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as a first for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received differing opinions. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, referred to it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a difficult period within the church's past”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but had come “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the disease as divine punishment”.

Internationally, several faith-based organizations have tried to make amends for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it described as “shameful” actions, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage should only represent a bond between male and female.

Several months ago, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”