After a gunman killed 49 people and wounded dozens of others at Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year, Rev. James Martin heard many of his fellow Catholic clergy members offer condolences. But what struck him most was what he didn’t hear.
What was missing from many of their messages, Martin says, was any acknowledgment that most of the victims were LGBT people. “That to me was really revealing, and that showed me that even in death LGBT Catholics were invisible to the institutional church,” he tells The Advocate.