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Amid deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway issued a formal apology for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has caused LGBTQ+ people shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, the church leader, announced this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and that is why today I say sorry.”

“Unequal treatment, harassment and discrimination” had caused a loss of faith for some, the bishop admitted. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to come after the apology.

The statement of regret took place at a venue called London Pub, one of two bars attacked during the 2022 shooting that took two lives and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who expressed support for ISIS, was given a prison term to at least 30 years behind bars for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is the most extensive faith community in the country – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ individuals, preventing them from joining the clergy or to marry in church. In the 1950s, bishops of the church referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

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 in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, Norway's church started appointing homosexual ministers, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to have church weddings since 2017. In 2023, Tveit joined in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was called an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology was met with a mixed reaction. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “a crucial act of amends” and a point in time that “represented the closure of a dark chapter in the history of the church”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “powerful and significant” but had come “too late for those who passed away from AIDS … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the disease as divine punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have attempted to reconcile for their past behavior towards LGBTQ+ people. During 2023, England's church expressed regret for what it referred to as its “shameful” treatment, even as it still declines to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland in the past year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their families, but stayed firm in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church of Canada offered an apology to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, describing it as a confirmation of its “pledge to complete acceptance and open hospitality” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to celebrate and delight in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the church's general secretary, said. “We caused pain to people instead of seeking wholeness. We are sorry.”