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Against red stage curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Norwegian Lutheran Church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“The national church has inflicted LGBTQ+ people harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced during a Thursday event. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was planned to take place after his statement.

This formal apology was delivered at a venue called London Pub, one of two bars targeted in the 2022 attack that took two lives and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to no less than 30 years behind bars for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, denying them the opportunity to become pastors or to marry in church. During the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, becoming the second in the world to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining gay pastors, and gay and lesbian couples could marry in church since 2017. Last year, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday was met with varied responses. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, described it as “an important reparation” and a point in time that “signaled the conclusion of a difficult period within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but was delivered “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … carrying heavy hearts as the church regarded the crisis as punishment from God”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to offer apologies for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, even as it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but held fast in the view that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, Canada's United Church offered an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, labeling it a confirmation 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 all of your beautiful creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”