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Set against deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church offered an apology for discrimination and harm perpetrated over the years.

“The church in Norway has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the lead bishop, the church leader, declared on Thursday. “This should never have happened and that is why I offer my apology now.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A religious service at Oslo's main cathedral was planned to take place after his statement.

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub, one among two bars targeted in the 2022 violent incident that killed two people and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to no less than 30 years behind bars for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Church of Norway – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to have church weddings. During the 1950s, bishops of the church characterized LGBTQ+ persons as “a worldwide social threat”.

Yet, with Norwegian society turning more progressive, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples in 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and LGBTQ+ partners have been able to marry in church since 2017. Last year, Tveit joined in the Pride march in Oslo in what was described as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received a mixed reaction. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a painful era in the history of the church”.

According to Stephen Adom, the head of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but was delivered “not in time for those among us who died of Aids … with deep sorrow in their hearts as the church regarded the crisis as punishment from God”.

Globally, a few churches have tried to offer apologies for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, the Church of England said sorry for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, although it still declines to allow same-sex marriages within the church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but held fast in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church of Canada issued an apology to two spirit and LGBTQIA+ communities, characterizing it as a confirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have failed to rejoice and take pleasure in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, stated. “We caused pain to people rather than pursuing healing. We apologize.”