Let us begin with a little story about the National Catholic Reporter (which Fr Z calls the “Fishwrap”), a paper which if you judged that paper by the standards of its best-known correspondent, the excellent John Allen, you might have thought a reasonable and balanced paper, rather than what it actually is, a polemical rag dedicated to the undermining of the Magisterium.   The story begins with an article, “Catholic sexual ethics: complementarity and the truly human”  by Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler, published in 2004 in Theological Studies, a Jesuit journal in which, according to the Fishwrap, “two theologians argued for a change in Church teachings on divorce and remarriage”. Actually, it argued against a lot more than Church teachings on divorce and remarriage (the Fishwrap reporter doesn’t seem to have read it): it also questioned, among other things, the Church’s teachings on the possibility of marriage between homosexual persons. Some seven years later, in June of this year, Theological Studies belatedly published a reply: an article upholding, says the Fishwrap, the indissolubility of marriage. That’s what has got the NCR into a tizzy. There has been a conspiracy, they claim: