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Amid crimson theater drapes at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

“The national church has inflicted LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, declared on Thursday. “This should never have happened and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to a loss of faith for some, Tveit recognized. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to come after the apology.

The apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, one of two bars targeted in the 2022 shooting that killed two people and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was sentenced to at least 30 years in incarceration for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Church of Norway – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, ranking as the second globally to allow same-sex registered partnerships back in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples could get married in religious ceremonies starting in 2017. Last year, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology elicited varied responses. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, referred to it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a dark chapter in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the statement was “strong and important” but was delivered “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … carrying heavy hearts since the church viewed the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, several faith-based organizations have attempted to make amends for their past behavior towards LGBTQ+ people. During 2023, England's church said sorry for what it characterized as its “shameful” treatment, though it still declines to permit gay marriages within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but stayed firm in its conviction that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church offered an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing it as a confirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, stated. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”