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Against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for hurtful actions and exclusion perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has caused the LGBTQ+ community pain, shame and significant harm,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, stated this Thursday. “This should never have happened and that is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” resulted in some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was scheduled to take place after his statement.

The apology was delivered at the London Pub establishment, one among two bars attacked during the 2022 violent incident that took two lives and left nine seriously injured at Oslo's Pride event. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in prison for the killings.

Like many religions around the world, the Church of Norway – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from joining the clergy or to have church weddings. Back in the 1950s, the church’s bishops described gay people as a “social danger of global proportions”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, becoming the second in the world to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining gay pastors, and gay and lesbian couples could marry in church starting in 2017. In 2023, the bishop took part in the Pride march in Oslo in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

The apology on Thursday elicited varied responses. The director of a group representing Norwegian Christian lesbians, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “an important reparation” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but arrived “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, a few churches have tried to make amends for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2023, the Church of England said sorry for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, even as it still declines to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year apologised for “shortcomings in pastoral care and support” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but held fast in its conviction that marriage could only be a bond between male and female.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church issued an apology toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, labeling it a confirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We have wounded people instead of seeking wholeness. We are sorry.”