A senior Vatican official and advisor to Pope Francis has said that the Roman Catholic Church should seriously think about allowing priests to marry.

“This is probably the first time I’m saying it publicly and it will sound heretical to some people,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who is also adjunct secretary in the Vatican’s doctrinal office, told the Times of Malta.

Pope Francis has ruled out any chance that he would change the Roman Catholic rule requiring priests to be celibate.

Scicluna noted that priests were allowed to marry in the first millennium of the Church’s history and that marriage is allowed today in the Eastern rite of the Catholic Church.

“If it were up to me, I would revise the requirement that priests have to be celibate,” he said. “Experience has shown me that this is something we need to seriously think about.”

Scicluna said the Church had “lost many great priests because they chose marriage”. He said “there is a place” for celibacy in the Church but that it also had to take into consideration that a priest sometimes falls in love. He then has to choose “between her and the priesthood and some priests cope with that by secretly engaging in sentimental relationships”.

Priests are allowed to marry in the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church as well as in the Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican Churches.