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Amid red stage curtains at one of Oslo’s most prominent LGBTQ+ spaces, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for discrimination and harm caused by the church.

“The church in Norway has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, announced on Thursday. “This ought not to have occurred and that is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A religious service at the cathedral in Oslo was planned to come after the apology.

This formal apology was delivered at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 attack that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, received a sentence to at least 30 years in incarceration for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, refusing to allow them to become pastors or to have church weddings. Back in the 1950s, church leaders characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to allow same-sex registered partnerships in 1993 and in 2009 the first Scandinavian country to approve gay marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining LGBTQ+ clergy, and gay and lesbian couples have been able to marry in church starting in 2017. During 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

The apology on Thursday elicited a mixed reaction. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, who is also a gay pastor, referred to it as “an important reparation” and an occasion that “represented the closure of a difficult period within the church's past”.

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

Worldwide, a few churches have attempted to make amends for historical treatment towards LGBTQ+ people. Last year, England's church said sorry for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, although it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

Similarly, Ireland's Methodist Church the previous year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their families, but stayed firm in its conviction that matrimony must only constitute a partnership of one man and one woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a confirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” in all aspects of church life.

“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, stated. “We have wounded people rather than pursuing healing. We express our regret.”