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Amid deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church offered an apology for harm and unequal treatment perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has brought the LGBTQ+ community harm, suffering and humiliation,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and that is why today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to a loss of faith for some, the bishop admitted. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

This formal apology occurred at a venue called London Pub, one of two bars involved in the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian of Iranian origin, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was sentenced to no less than 30 years in prison for the murders.

In common with various worldwide religions, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, preventing them to become pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church started appointing homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to marry in church starting in 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology elicited differing opinions. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “an important reparation” and a point in time that “represented the closure of a difficult period within the church's past”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “strong and important” but arrived “not in time for those who lost their lives to AIDS … carrying heavy hearts as the church regarded the epidemic as divine punishment”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have tried to make amends for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, England's church apologised for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, although it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year issued an apology for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but remained staunch in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a bond between male and female.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a renewed commitment of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

“We have not succeeded to honor and appreciate the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, stated. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”