Saving a fellow survivor

Minn. woman to donate kidney after Roslindale man sought help from other victims of clergy abuse

Doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will transplant a kidney from Susan Pavlak (left) to Phil Saviano. (Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff) By Michael Paulson Globe Staff August 26, 2009

First, he asked his brothers.

Then he turned to extended family.

It was only after it became clear that no one in his family qualified to donate a kidney that Phil Saviano realized he might die.

And then he turned to the one larger community that he has embraced for nearly two decades: survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

Across the country, thousands of men and women who years ago were molested by priests opened their inboxes to find an e-mailed plea to help a fellow survivor.

Seven of them offered up a kidney to keep Saviano alive.

And today, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, physicians will transplant a kidney from Susan Pavlak, a 55-year-old Minnesota woman who says that years ago she was molested by a former nun at a Catholic high school, to Saviano, a 57-year-old Roslindale man who says that as a boy in Central Massachusetts he was repeatedly abused by a priest who turned out to be a serial pedophile.

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