In Scotland, as in many other countries around the world, the response of ordinary people to the Florida gun attack was an uplifting one. In Glasgow last Monday evening, more than 600 people gathered in the city’s George Square to mourn the 49 who were killed at a gay nightclub in Orlando. A few days later in Edinburgh, a similar number huddled under umbrellas in St Andrew’s Square to remember the Florida fallen.

Many of those who attended these vigils were not only grieving for the dead but showing solidarity with the Scottish lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. This was entirely appropriate as few of us who have LGBT friends have not had our lives enriched and made more vibrant by their friendship. They have offered us forgiveness and compassion when they were entitled to be resentful and bitter at the way they have been treated in this country for generations.

There is still, nevertheless, a tendency among some of the newly enlightened to look askance at civic Scotland’s frequent displays of solidarity and support for the LGBT community. This manifests itself in sentiments such as: “Yes, OK, I’m as gay-friendly as anyone but do we really have to be so overt about it all?”

Sometimes, it is followed by: “You wouldn’t see so much hoopla if it was another minority group.”

I have instinctively harboured such sentiments myself and occasionally may even have expressed them. They betray ignorance over the insidious nature of discrimination and the extent to which it can destroy lives from the inside. It also fails to acknowledge that no amount of civic enthusiasm in expressing solidarity with our LGBT community can ever match the decades of fear, suspicion and hostility that characterised this country’s dealings with those among us whose sexuality was deemed to be “abnormal”, “other” and “grotesque”.

In George Square, there were floral tributes and lit candles while a piper played Flower of Scotland. The names of the victims in Pulse nightclub were read aloud by Joanna Branch, a student from South Carolina. She said: “We’re here to mourn the loss of lives at a nightclub where people thought they were safe to be who they wanted to be.”

Clo Meehan, from the Free Pride Glasgow group said: “The fact is that for a lot of us who are LGBTQ, seeing that kind of hatred is not as much of a shock because it is just an extreme of the hatred that we do we face every day, from harassment on the street, harassment from our family and our work places.”

A week has passed since the massacre occurred and I am still waiting for my Catholic church in Scotland to express its sympathy and support for our LGBT community. I am hopeful that, even at this stage, it may still do so. Pope Francis has already condemned the massacre and promised prayers for the victims and their families, but it is important that the Scottish bishops’ conference does so too.

It is known that many priests, among them some bishops, are gay as well as tens of thousands of ordinary Catholics. And while many have deserted the church owing to the medieval attitudes they have encountered in it, many more continue to confess Jesus Christ as their saviour and seek pastoral support and guidance. They rarely get it, though.

As Ms Meehan said, many in the LGBT community still face discrimination in modern, enlightened Scotland, but if you are also Catholic then you face further suspicion. It is barely three years since Cardinal Keith Patrick O’Brien was forced to resign following revelations in this newspaper that he’d had inappropriate sexual relationships with priests and seminarians over whom he held pastoral authority. Not long before this, he had fronted a campaign to oppose gay marriage during which he described same-sex marriage as a “grotesque perversion”.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned after it was revealed that he had had inappropriate relationships with priests. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

This was not only a deeply un-Christian and unkind phrase for a Christian pastoral leader to use, it was, as it turned out, the most extreme instance of clerical hypocrisy I have ever encountered.

The church’s communications executive has expanded greatly over the last few years and you might have thought its senior officers would have advised caution or prudence in their boss’s choice of language. After all, aspects of his private life were known to some of them. Yet the feeling persists that the Catholic church in Scotland is being directed by a hard-line group of lay religious ultras who have exploited a leadership vacuum in the church following the Cardinal O’Brien scandal.

Some of these people think that organising a 40-night vigil outside of Glasgow’s new Queen Elizabeth Hospital to protest about abortion is a desirable way to go about their business. Thus, women at their most fragile and vulnerable were also being faced by emotional intimidation by this bunch of unrepresentative Catholic zealots. The Catholic church, not unexpectedly, was at the forefront of the campaign to oppose same-sex marriage. In a liberal democracy that is its right. As a Christian, though, I’d prefer the church to reserve most of its anger for the real moral scandals in this affluent country: child poverty, homelessness, unemployment and health inequality.

A moral and ecclesiastical conundrum exists at the heart of hard-line Catholic attitudes to issues surrounding an individual’s sexual orientation. Those who adhere to such thinking confess that God is omnipotent and omniscient; that He does not make mistakes and that everything He creates is sacred and pleasing to Him.

God made gay people and so, as He does not make mistakes, presumably their sexual orientation is part of His plan for their lives and is pleasing to Him. Presumably also then, being murdered because of their sexuality is displeasing to Him.

I remain hopeful that the Catholic church in Scotland will join with Scotland’s main political parties and the majority of its citizens to express sorrow at what happened in a gay Orlando nightclub last weekend. The victims were children of God and loved by Him and so are those in the LGBT community who today feel a little more fearful and vulnerable as a result. The church to which I belong must now also reach out to them.

• Comments will be opened later