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Amid crimson theater drapes at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Church of Norway expressed regret for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has caused the LGBTQ+ community shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, announced this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and this is why today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to follow his apology.

The statement of regret occurred at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 shooting 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, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for the murders.

In common with various worldwide religions, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, preventing them from joining the clergy 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, ranking as the second globally to allow same-sex registered partnerships back in 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, Norway's church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies starting in 2017. During 2023, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The apology on Thursday elicited varied responses. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and a moment that “represented the closure 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 apology was “meaningful and vital” but was delivered “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have tried to reconcile for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it described as “disgraceful” conduct, though it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, Ireland's Methodist Church last year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their relatives, but stayed firm in the view that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have failed to celebrate and delight in all of your beautiful creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We are sorry.”