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Set against red stage curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, declared during a Thursday event. “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 church service at the cathedral in Oslo was planned to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 shooting that took two lives and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, received a sentence to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. During the 1950s, bishops of the church referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and in 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

During 2007, the Church of Norway commenced the ordination of homosexual ministers, and gay and lesbian couples have been able to marry in church starting in 2017. Last year, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The Thursday statement of regret received a mixed reaction. The leader of an organization of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “finally marked the end of a dark chapter within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “strong and important” but was delivered “too late for those among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts as the church regarded the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, a few churches have attempted to reconcile for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, even as it continues to refuse to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland in the past year expressed regret for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but held fast in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church delivered a statement of regret to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a reaffirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to honor and appreciate all of your beautiful creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have hurt individuals rather than pursuing healing. We are sorry.”