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Set against red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

“The national church has caused LGBTQ+ people pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to some to lose their faith, the bishop admitted. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to follow his apology.

The apology occurred at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars involved in the 2022 attack 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, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. During the 1950s, bishops of the church described gay people 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 in 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

Back in 2007, Norway's church started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples have been able to have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit participated in the Oslo Pride event in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday received varied responses. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a dark chapter in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but arrived “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the crisis as punishment from God”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for historical treatment regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, the Anglican Church apologised for what it described as “disgraceful” conduct, though it continues to refuse to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage could only be a bond between male and female.

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

“We did not manage to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We are sorry.”