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Amid deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for harm and unequal treatment caused by the church.

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

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” resulted in a loss of faith for some, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was planned to take place after his statement.

The apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two attacked during the 2022 shooting that took two lives and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to at least 30 years behind bars for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, denying them the opportunity from joining the clergy or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, the church’s bishops characterized LGBTQ+ persons 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 in 1993 and in 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples were permitted to marry in church since 2017. During 2023, the bishop took part in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday was met with a mixed reaction. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era in the history of the church”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology was “powerful and significant” but arrived “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the crisis as divine punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have tried to make amends for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Church of England said sorry for what it described as “disgraceful” conduct, although it persists in refusing to permit gay marriages in church.

In a similar vein, Ireland's Methodist Church in the past year expressed regret for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but stayed firm 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 issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

“We did not manage to honor and appreciate the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”