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Against red stage curtains 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 brought LGBTQ+ people pain, shame and significant harm,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, announced this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I apologise today.”

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

The apology took place at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 shooting that took two lives and caused serious injuries to nine during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, received a sentence to no less than 30 years behind bars for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the most extensive faith community in the country – had long marginalised the LGBTQ+ community, refusing to allow them to become pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, becoming the second in the world to legalize same-sex partnerships during 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, Norway's church started appointing homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners could have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event 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 representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie, who is also a gay pastor, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “strong and important” but was delivered “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the crisis as punishment from God”.

Worldwide, several faith-based organizations have sought to offer apologies for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. Last year, England's church said sorry for what it described as “shameful” actions, although it persists in refusing to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, Ireland's Methodist Church last year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but held fast in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a bond between male and female.

In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada offered an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, remarked. “We have hurt individuals rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”