GRAND RAPIDS (MI)
WOOD TV
February 14, 2019
By Ken Kolker
No matter how many years pass, the memories will not.
The bad ones burn deepest: like what happened more than once in the small log cabin on the Grand Rapids-Walker city line to a 12-year-old girl who thought she was Father John Sullivan’s one and only.
Or what she saw through the small second-floor window on the south side of her family’s home, the window on the left, as her abuser walked away with his arm around her little sister.
“I knew what he was going to be doing,” Fran Heinemann said.
There’s the pew in a small country church near Grand Haven where the priest first approached a 14-year-old girl who wanted to be a nun, his latest prey.
The broom closet at Holy Spirit in Grand Rapids.
There’s the spot on Campau Lake near Caledonia, about 100 yards out, where a 12-year-old altar boy went swimming with a priest he idolized.
And there’s the confessional where the abused went to their abuser for forgiveness of sins they thought were their own.
“I knew it was him because you’d see him walk in there to do confessions,” Heinemann said.
The Roman Catholic dioceses in Grand Rapids and across Michigan are bracing for the worst from a state attorney general’s investigation into decades of priest abuse: the possibility that it could uncover more abusive priests, more cover-ups and more survivors than ever before revealed.
The AG started investigating after a grand jury in Pennsylvania revealed that 300 priests had molested 1,000 children since the 1940s. That prompted Target 8 to investigate the legacy of abuse in the Grand Rapids diocese.
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