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Amid crimson theater drapes at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“Norway's church has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the lead bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced during a Thursday event. “This should never have happened and this is why I offer my apology now.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A worship service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

This formal apology took place at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 attack that took two lives and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, received a sentence 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 the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, preventing them from joining the clergy or from marrying in religious ceremonies. During the 1950s, the church’s bishops described gay people as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, ranking as the second globally to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and by 2009 the first in Scandinavia to approve gay marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway began ordaining homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples were permitted to marry in church from 2017 onward. In 2023, the bishop took part in the Pride march in Oslo in what was noted as a first for the church.

The apology on Thursday received differing opinions. The head of a network for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, called it “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a difficult period within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the director of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the statement was “meaningful and vital” but was delivered “overdue for individuals who passed away from AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the crisis to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have attempted to reconcile for their actions towards LGBTQ+ people. In 2023, the Anglican Church expressed regret for what it characterized as “shameful” actions, though it continues to refuse to permit gay marriages in religious settings.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year apologised for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their relatives, but held fast in its conviction that marriage should only represent 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 its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in every part of the church's activities.

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