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Amid crimson theater drapes at a leading Oslo LGBTQ+ venue, Norway's national church expressed regret for hurtful actions and exclusion perpetrated over the years.

“Norway's church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals pain, shame and significant harm,” the presiding bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, declared this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and this is why I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to certain individuals abandoning their faith, the bishop admitted. A religious service at Oslo Cathedral was scheduled to come after the apology.

The apology occurred at a venue called London Pub, one among two bars involved in the 2022 violent incident that resulted in two deaths and injured nine people severely throughout the Oslo Pride festivities. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State, was sentenced to a minimum of three decades in incarceration for the killings.

In common with various worldwide religions, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Lutheran evangelical community that is Norway’s largest faith community – for years sidelined LGBTQ+ people, refusing to allow them to become pastors or to marry in church. Back in the 1950s, church leaders referred to homosexual individuals as “a global-scale societal hazard”.

However, as Norway's society grew more liberal, becoming the second in the world to permit registered partnerships for same-sex couples back in 1993 and during 2009 the first Scandinavian country to allow same-sex marriage, the religious institution eventually adapted.

In 2007, Norway's church started appointing LGBTQ+ clergy, and same-sex couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies from 2017 onward. Last year, Tveit joined in the Oslo Pride event in what was noted as an unprecedented step for the church.

Thursday’s apology received a mixed reaction. The director of a group for Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a crucial act of amends” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a painful era within the church's past”.

For Stephen Adom, the leader of the Norwegian Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the statement was “powerful and significant” but had come “overdue for individuals who passed away from AIDS … carrying heavy hearts since the church viewed the crisis to be God’s punishment”.

Globally, a handful of religious institutions have sought to offer apologies for historical treatment towards LGBTQ+ people. Last year, the Church of England expressed regret for what it described as “shameful” actions, though it persists in refusing to permit gay marriages in church.

Similarly, Ireland's Methodist Church last year issued an apology for “inadequate pastoral assistance and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and family members, but stayed firm in its conviction that marriage could only be a partnership of one man and one woman.

Several months ago, Canada's United Church 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” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in the beauty of all creation,” Reverend Blair, the general secretary of the church, stated. “We have hurt individuals in place of fostering completeness. We express our regret.”