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Amid red stage curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“The national church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This should never have happened and that is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A worship service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to come after the apology.

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and caused serious injuries to nine throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades in prison for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, preventing them to become pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and during 2009 the initial Nordic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies since 2017. Last year, Tveit participated in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday was met with differing opinions. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, referred to it as “an important reparation” and a point in time that “finally marked the end of a dark chapter in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “strong and important” but arrived “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish as the church regarded the crisis as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, several faith-based organizations have attempted to offer apologies for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, the Church of England expressed regret for what it described as “shameful” actions, even as it continues to refuse to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people 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 toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a confirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have failed to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We caused pain to people instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”