Against a backdrop of Oslo’s most prominent queer venues, the Church of Norway has issued a formal apology to LGBTQ+ people for decades of discrimination, shame and exclusion. Presiding Bishop Olav Fykse Tveit delivered the historic apology at the London Pub, a landmark gay bar and the site of a 2022 shooting during Oslo Pride that left two people dead and nine seriously injured.

“The Church in Norway has imposed shame, great harm and pain,” Tveit said. “This should never have happened, and that is why I apologise today.” Speaking on behalf of the country’s Bishops’ Conference, he acknowledged that the church’s actions had caused many to lose their faith and thanked those who had fought for acceptance and equality.

The apology was followed by a special service at Oslo Cathedral, symbolising an effort to reconcile faith and inclusion. It also follows the bishops’ 2022 statement acknowledging the “pain and suffering” the church had caused.

For much of the 20th century, the Church of Norway, an evangelical Lutheran institution and the country’s largest faith community, marginalised queer people, banning them from ordination and denying them marriage rites. In the 1950s, its bishops went as far as calling homosexuality a “social danger of global proportions.”

As Norwegian society grew more liberal, legalising same-sex partnerships in 1993 and marriage in 2009, the church’s stance slowly evolved. It began ordaining gay clergy in 2007 and, a decade later, allowed same-sex couples to marry in church. In 2023, Tveit became the first presiding bishop to participate in Oslo Pride.

Reactions to the apology have been mixed. Hanne Marie Pedersen-Eriksen, a gay pastor and head of Norway’s network of Christian lesbians, described it as “an important reparation”, marking “the end of a dark chapter.” But Stephen Adom, leader of the Association for Gender and Sexual Diversity, said it came “too late,” referring to those who suffered AIDS-related deaths with “hearts full of anguish because the church called their suffering God’s punishment.”

The Church of Norway now joins a small but growing number of religious institutions worldwide, such as the Church of England, the Methodist Church in Ireland, and the United Church of Canada, that have begun confronting their historic mistreatment of LGBTQ+ people and pledging a future rooted in inclusion and equality.