“For some priests, it would be better if they were married — not just for sexual reasons, but because it would be better for their life and they wouldn’t be lonely,” Cardinal Reinhard Marx said in the newspaper interview. “We must hold this discussion.”

The influential cardinal archbishop of Munich is coordinator of the Vatican’s Council for the Economy, a member of the Pope’s advisory Council of Cardinals, former president of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the EU, and former president of the German Bishops’ Conference.