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Set against red stage curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” led to some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A worship service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to follow his apology.

The statement of regret took place at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that took two lives and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the most extensive faith community in the country – had long marginalised the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, bishops of the church referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining gay pastors, and gay and lesbian couples could marry in church from 2017 onward. Last year, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a historic moment for the religious institution.

Thursday’s apology was met with differing opinions. The leader of an organization for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, herself a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a painful era in the church’s history”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the director of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology was “strong and important” but had come “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, several faith-based organizations have tried to offer apologies for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, England's church said sorry for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, though it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year apologised for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their families, but held fast in its conviction that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, labeling it a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We caused pain to people instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”