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Against deep red curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Norwegian Lutheran Church offered an apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The national church has caused LGBTQ+ individuals harm, suffering and humiliation,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced on Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and that is why I apologise today.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” resulted in certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to take place after his statement.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and left nine seriously injured throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, was sentenced to at least 30 years in incarceration for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the most extensive faith community in the country – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, preventing them to become pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, ranking as the second globally to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples during 1993 and in 2009 the initial Nordic nation to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

During 2007, Norway's church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples could get married in religious ceremonies from 2017 onward. In 2023, Tveit participated in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as a first for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received differing opinions. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, a lesbian minister herself, called it “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “powerful and significant” but arrived “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the epidemic to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have tried to reconcile for their past behavior concerning the LGBTQ+ community. In 2023, England's church apologised for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, even as it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year apologised for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but remained staunch in the view that marriage could only be a union between a man and a woman.

Several months ago, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”