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Amid deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Church of Norway offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, announced on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to follow his apology.

The apology took place at the London Pub establishment, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 shooting that took two lives and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was given a prison term to at least 30 years in incarceration for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them to become pastors or to have church weddings. In the 1950s, church leaders described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, ranking as the second globally to legalize same-sex partnerships back in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to marry in church since 2017. During 2023, the bishop took part in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

Thursday’s apology was met with differing opinions. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and a point in time that “finally marked the end of a painful era in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology was “powerful and significant” but had come “not in time for those who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish because the church considered the crisis as punishment from God”.

Internationally, several faith-based organizations have tried to reconcile for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, England's church said sorry for what it characterized as its “shameful” treatment, even as it persists in refusing to permit gay marriages within the church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland last year expressed regret for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but held fast in the view that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church based in Canada offered an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a confirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We did not manage to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”