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Against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason I offer my apology now.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to come after the apology.

The apology took place at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars targeted in the 2022 shooting that resulted in two deaths and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised the LGBTQ+ community, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. During the 1950s, church leaders described gay people 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 in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners could have church weddings starting in 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited a mixed reaction. The leader of an organization for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, called it “a crucial act of amends” and a point in time that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era within the church's past”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the head 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 … with deep sorrow in their hearts since the church viewed the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, several faith-based organizations have sought to make amends for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Church of England said sorry for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, though it continues to refuse to permit gay marriages within the church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but remained staunch in its conviction 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 issued an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a confirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, stated. “We have wounded people instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”