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Amid crimson theater drapes at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church expressed regret for discrimination and harm caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ people pain, shame and significant harm,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to come after the apology.

This formal apology occurred at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved 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 swore loyalty to Islamic State, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades in prison for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the most extensive faith community in the country – had long marginalised the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them to become pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, bishops of the church described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, becoming the second in the world to legalize same-sex partnerships during 1993 and in 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples could have church weddings from 2017 onward. Last year, the bishop took part in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday elicited differing opinions. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a difficult period within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “strong and important” but had come “overdue for individuals who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the disease as divine punishment”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to reconcile for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, although it continues to refuse to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year expressed regret for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but remained staunch in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, Canada's United Church offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We have hurt individuals rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”