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Against red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church offered an apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated on Thursday. “This should never have happened and this is why I apologise today.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused a loss of faith for some, Tveit recognized. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to come after the apology.

The statement of regret occurred at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 shooting that took two lives and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to at least 30 years in prison for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, denying them the opportunity from serving as pastors or to marry in church. During the 1950s, the church’s bishops described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships back in 1993 and in 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to have church weddings from 2017 onward. Last year, the bishop took part in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received varied responses. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the head of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but arrived “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts because the church considered the crisis to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, several faith-based organizations have tried to reconcile for historical treatment regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it characterized as “disgraceful” conduct, though it still declines to permit gay marriages within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year expressed regret for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and family members, but stayed firm in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, characterizing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, stated. “We caused pain to people instead of seeking wholeness. We apologize.”