ROME — Leaders of gay Catholic groups on Monday praised Pope Francis for saying that all Christians and the Roman Catholic Church owed an apology to gays for previous mistreatment, even as the groups called on the church to take more concrete steps to repudiate past teachings and condemn anti-gay violence.

Streaking across the sky on Sunday night in his papal airliner, returning from a visit to Armenia, Francis also visibly winced, momentarily overcome with emotion, when a journalist, Cindy Wooden, mentioned the recent attack at an Orlando gay nightclub and noted that Christians are sometimes blamed for stigmatizing homosexuals.

Francis did not directly address the Orlando killings. But he endorsed a comment of one of his top advisers who, soon after the Orlando attack, said that the church had marginalized gay people and should apologize.

The pope said the church “must” not only apologize to a gay person it offended, “but we must apologize to the poor, to women who have been exploited, to children forced into labor.”