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Set against deep red curtains at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, the Church of Norway expressed regret for harm and unequal treatment it had inflicted.

“The national church has brought the LGBTQ+ community shame, great harm and pain,” bishop Olav Fykse Tveit, Bishop Tveit, declared this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason today I say sorry.”

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused certain individuals abandoning their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was arranged to follow his apology.

The statement of regret was delivered at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 attack that killed two people and caused serious injuries to nine during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for carrying out the attacks.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. During the 1950s, bishops of the church referred to homosexual individuals as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, emerging as the world's second to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples back in 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church gradually changed.

In 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church commenced the ordination of LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples have been able to have church weddings starting in 2017. Last year, the bishop took part in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret received a mixed reaction. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, called it “an important reparation” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a difficult period within the church's past”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity in Norway, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but had come “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts because the church considered the crisis to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have sought to reconcile for their past behavior regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, although it still declines to authorize same-sex weddings within the church.

Similarly, the Methodist Church located in Ireland last year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” to LGBTQ+ people and family members, but held fast in its conviction that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret toward Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ individuals, describing it as a renewed commitment of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in every part of the church's activities.

“We did not manage to celebrate and delight in the wonderful diversity of creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We have hurt individuals rather than pursuing healing. We express our regret.”