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Amid crimson theater drapes at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and which is the reason I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to some to lose their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to take place after his statement.

This formal apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops 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 first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, Norway's church began ordaining gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to get married in religious ceremonies from 2017 onward. In 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited differing opinions. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “represented the closure of a dark chapter within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but had come “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the epidemic as punishment from God”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, England's church expressed regret for what it described as “shameful” actions, although it continues to refuse to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

In a similar vein, Ireland's Methodist Church last year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but held fast in the view that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church of Canada offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, describing it as a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have failed to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We express our regret.”