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Against deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has brought LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A worship service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to take place after his statement.

The statement of regret was delivered at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in 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 in prison for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, denying them the opportunity to become pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, church leaders characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, becoming the second in the world to allow same-sex registered partnerships during 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway commenced the ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples could get married in religious ceremonies starting in 2017. During 2023, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday elicited a mixed reaction. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, called it “an important reparation” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a dark chapter in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but arrived “overdue for individuals who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, a few churches have tried to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, England's church expressed regret for what it characterized as its “shameful” treatment, although it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but remained staunch in the view that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, Canada's United Church delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, 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,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”