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Amid red stage curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has inflicted LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, declared during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to come after the apology.

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 violent incident that killed two people and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to no less than 30 years in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, denying them the opportunity from joining the clergy or to marry in church. In the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, ranking as the second globally to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples could marry in church starting in 2017. Last year, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called a first for the church.

Thursday’s apology received varied responses. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “strong and important” but arrived “too late for those among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts since the church viewed the crisis as punishment from God”.

Internationally, a few churches have tried to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. During 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it described as “disgraceful” conduct, even as it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but held fast in its belief that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a reaffirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”