What to many people may seem like a bolt from heaven is, in reality, the culmination of ten years of intensive and tragic investigation. No objective judgment can be formed without access to the nearly 200-page appendix to the statement of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Conference of German bishops. It contains all the relevant documents from 1967 to 1979. When studied without prejudice, the surface perturbances recede and the real issues come to the fore. In the following I shall refer to source materials by page numbers in the Appendix of the German Bishops' statements. 

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