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Set against deep red curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, Norway's national church expressed regret for discrimination and harm it had inflicted.

“The church in Norway has inflicted LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” the presiding bishop, Bishop Tveit, announced during a Thursday event. “This ought not to have occurred and this is why today I say sorry.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A church service at the cathedral in Oslo was arranged to take place after his statement.

The statement of regret occurred at the London Pub, a bar that was one of two targeted in the 2022 shooting that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely at Oslo's Pride event. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who swore loyalty to Islamic State, was sentenced to no less than 30 years in prison for the murders.

Like many religions around the world, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – an evangelical Lutheran church that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, church leaders described gay people as “a worldwide social threat”.

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 by 2009 the initial Nordic nation to legalize same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

During 2007, the Norwegian Lutheran Church commenced the ordination of gay pastors, and same-sex couples could marry in church since 2017. In 2023, Tveit participated in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

The Thursday statement of regret was met with a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Hanne Marie, herself a gay pastor, referred to it as “a crucial act of amends” and a moment that “represented the closure of a painful era in the church’s history”.

According to Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology represented “meaningful and vital” but arrived “overdue for individuals who lost their lives to AIDS … carrying heavy hearts because the church considered the crisis to be God’s punishment”.

Worldwide, a handful of religious institutions have tried to reconcile for their actions concerning the LGBTQ+ community. During 2023, the Church of England apologised for what it referred to as “disgraceful” conduct, even as it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages in religious settings.

In a similar vein, the Methodist Church located in Ireland the previous year expressed regret for its “failures in pastoral support and care” regarding the LGBTQ+ community and their relatives, but remained staunch in its conviction that marriage could only be 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+ groups, characterizing it as a reaffirmation of the church’s “commitment to radical hospitality and full inclusion” in all aspects of church life.

“We did not manage to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Rev Michael Blair, the top administrative leader of the church, remarked. “We caused pain to people in place of fostering completeness. We apologize.”