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Amid red stage curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Church of Norway expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion it had inflicted.

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

“Harassment, discrimination and unfair treatment” had caused some to lose their faith, Tveit acknowledged. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to take place after his statement.

The statement of regret took place at the London Pub establishment, one of two bars involved in the 2022 attack that took two lives and injured nine people severely during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. An individual of Iranian descent living in Norway, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was given a prison term to a minimum of three decades behind bars for the murders.

Similar to numerous global faiths, Norway's church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – historically excluded LGBTQ+ people, denying them the opportunity to become pastors or to marry in church. In the 1950s, the church’s bishops referred to homosexual individuals as “a worldwide social threat”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, ranking as the second globally to legalize same-sex partnerships in 1993 and during 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

Back in 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church began ordaining gay pastors, and LGBTQ+ partners were permitted to have church weddings from 2017 onward. In 2023, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as a historic moment for the religious institution.

Thursday’s apology received differing opinions. The director of a group of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, herself a gay pastor, called it “a crucial act of amends” and a point in time that “finally marked the end of a painful era in the church’s history”.

As stated by Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “meaningful and vital” but arrived “too late for those who lost their lives to AIDS … with deep sorrow in their hearts since the church viewed the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have tried to make amends for their actions regarding LGBTQ+ individuals. Last year, England's church apologised for what it referred to as “shameful” actions, though it continues to refuse to authorize same-sex weddings in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church located in Ireland in the past year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their families, but remained staunch in the view that marriage should only represent a union between a man and a woman.

Earlier this year, the United Church based in Canada delivered a statement of regret to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, labeling it a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in all aspects 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 in place of fostering completeness. We are sorry.”