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Amid deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“Norway's church has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” led to some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was arranged to come after the apology.

The apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, one among two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to at least 30 years in prison for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples back in 1993 and during 2009 the first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples have been able to have church weddings from 2017 onward. During 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

The apology on Thursday received a mixed reaction. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, herself a gay pastor, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a painful era in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “strong and important” but arrived “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the disease as punishment from God”.

Globally, a few churches have attempted to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, England's church said sorry for what it characterized as “disgraceful” conduct, though it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but remained staunch in the view that matrimony must only constitute a bond between male and female.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a reaffirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We have failed to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, said. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”