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Amid red stage curtains at a well-known Oslo location for LGBTQ+ gatherings, the Norwegian Lutheran Church issued a formal apology for hurtful actions and exclusion caused by the church.

“Norway's church has brought LGBTQ+ individuals shame, great harm and pain,” the lead bishop, Olav Fykse Tveit, stated this Thursday. “It was wrong for this to take place and which is the reason I apologise today.”

The “discrimination, unequal treatment and harassment” led to some to lose their faith, Tveit recognized. A church service at Oslo's main cathedral was scheduled to follow his apology.

The statement of regret took place at a venue called London Pub, a bar that was one of two involved in the 2022 attack that took two lives and left nine seriously injured during Oslo’s Pride celebrations. A Norwegian citizen originally from Iran, who expressed support for ISIS, received a sentence to at least 30 years in prison for the killings.

Similar to numerous global faiths, the Norwegian Lutheran Church – a Protestant Lutheran denomination that is the biggest religious group in Norway – for years sidelined the LGBTQ+ community, refusing to allow them from serving as pastors or from marrying in religious ceremonies. During the 1950s, church leaders characterized LGBTQ+ persons as a “social danger of global proportions”.

But as Norwegian society became increasingly liberal, becoming the second in the world to allow same-sex registered partnerships during 1993 and during 2009 the first in Scandinavia to legalize same-sex marriage, the church slowly followed.

In 2007, the Church of Norway started appointing homosexual ministers, and same-sex couples were permitted to get married in religious ceremonies since 2017. Last year, Tveit participated in Oslo’s Pride parade in what was described as a historic moment for the religious institution.

The apology on Thursday was met with differing opinions. The leader of an organization of Christian lesbians in Norway, Pedersen-Eriksen, a lesbian minister herself, described it as “a significant step toward healing” and an occasion that “finally marked the end of a difficult period in the church’s history”.

For Stephen Adom, the director of Norway’s Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, the apology was “meaningful and vital” but arrived “overdue for individuals who lost their lives to AIDS … with hearts filled with anguish since the church viewed the disease to be God’s punishment”.

Internationally, a few churches have tried to make amends for historical treatment concerning the LGBTQ+ community. Last year, the Anglican Church said sorry for what it described as its “shameful” treatment, although it persists in refusing to allow same-sex marriages in church.

Likewise, the Methodist Church in Ireland the previous year issued an apology for its “failures in pastoral support and care” toward LGBTQ+ individuals and their families, but stayed firm in its belief that matrimony must only constitute a partnership of one man and one woman.

In the early part of this year, Canada's United Church delivered a statement of regret to Two-Spirit and LGBTQIA+ groups, labeling it a reaffirmation of the church's “dedication to welcoming all and full inclusion” throughout every area of church life.

“We have not succeeded to rejoice and take pleasure in all of your beautiful creation,” Michael Blair, the general secretary of the church, said. “We have hurt individuals rather than pursuing healing. We express our regret.”