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Amid deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway expressed regret for discrimination and harm caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has inflicted the LGBTQ+ community shame, great harm and pain,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced this Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why I offer my apology now.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” resulted in some to lose their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was arranged to come after the apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub, one among two bars involved in the 2022 attack that took two lives and caused serious injuries to nine during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, received a sentence to no less than 30 years in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – had long marginalised the LGBTQ+ community, preventing them to become pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. During the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as a “social danger of global proportions”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, emerging as the world's second to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church commenced the ordination of homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples could have church weddings since 2017. Last year, the bishop took part in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret elicited varied responses. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, herself a gay pastor, called it “an important reparation” and a moment that “signaled the conclusion of a painful era within the church's past”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the director of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology represented “strong and important” but had come “overdue for individuals among us who died of Aids … carrying heavy hearts since the church viewed the crisis as divine punishment”.

Internationally, several faith-based organizations have tried to offer apologies for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. Last year, England's church expressed regret for what it described as “disgraceful” conduct, although it persists in refusing to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but remained staunch in the view that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”