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Set against red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has inflicted LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why I offer my apology now.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused some to lose their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was planned to follow his apology.

The statement of regret occurred at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 shooting that resulted in two deaths and caused serious injuries to nine at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to at least 30 years in prison for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the biggest religious group in Norway – historically excluded LGBTQ+ individuals, denying them the opportunity to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, bishops of the church referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

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 approve gay marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

In 2007, Norway's church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and LGBTQ+ partners could have church weddings since 2017. During 2023, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a historic moment for the religious institution.

Thursday’s apology was met with varied responses. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a dark chapter within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “powerful and significant” 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, several faith-based organizations have sought to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, England's church apologised for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, even as it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church in Ireland in the past year apologised for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and family members, but remained staunch in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church offered an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, 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 have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, stated. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We are sorry.”