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Against crimson theater drapes at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” led to some to lose their faith, the bishop admitted. A worship service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub, one among two bars involved in the 2022 shooting that took two lives and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, received a sentence to at least 30 years behind bars for the murders.

In common with various worldwide religions, Norway's church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – had long marginalised LGBTQ+ people, preventing them from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and in 2009 the initial Nordic nation to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners could marry in church from 2017 onward. During 2023, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was described as a historic moment for the religious institution.

Thursday’s apology received varied responses. The leader of an organization for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “an important reparation” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a dark chapter in the history of the church”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “meaningful and vital” but was delivered “too late for those among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts since the church viewed the crisis as divine punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to make amends for historical treatment towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it described as “shameful” actions, even as it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” to LGBTQ+ people and their families, but stayed firm in the view that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church issued an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have failed to honor and appreciate the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”