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Amid deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church offered an apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, the church leader, announced this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to come after the apology.

This formal apology occurred at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and caused serious injuries to nine during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to at least 30 years in prison for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ individuals, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or to marry in church. During the 1950s, bishops of the church described gay people as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, becoming the second in the world to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, Norway's church began ordaining homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a historic moment for the religious institution.

Thursday’s apology elicited varied responses. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, called it “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but arrived “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … with hearts filled with anguish because the church considered the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have sought to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, although it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year expressed regret for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but remained staunch in the view that marriage should only represent a bond between male and female.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada issued an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, describing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We did not manage to celebrate and delight in all of your beautiful creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”