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Amid red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church offered an apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The national church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why I offer my apology now.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at Oslo 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 killed two people and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded the LGBTQ+ community, denying them the opportunity to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

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

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to have church weddings 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 differing opinions. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, called it “a significant step toward healing” and a moment that “signaled the conclusion of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the director 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 … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the crisis to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, several faith-based organizations have sought to make amends for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, England's church said sorry for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, even as it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but held fast in the view that matrimony must only constitute a partnership of one man and one woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a reaffirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to honor and appreciate the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”