Bonded by Abuse Crisis and Now a Kidney Michael Paulson, Boston Globe, August 27, 2009

Bonded by Abuse Crisis, and Now a Kidney

By Michael Paulson
Boston Globe
August 27, 2009

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles_of_faith/

Phil Saviano and Susan Pavlak in Brookline on Aug. 24, 2009.
Photo by Essdras M Suarez/ Globe Staff

In yesterday's paper, I had a story about a prominent local survivor of clergy sexual abuse who is getting a kidney transplant from another abuse survivor. The lede:

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.

“He is another member of the family of the harmed,’’ Pavlak said yesterday, explaining why she would give a kidney to a man she had never met or even heard of. “One way I can respond is to give what I have to give.’’

David Clohessy, the national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, and Dr. Martha Pavlakis, the nephrologist, tell me that the procedure went well. Saviano and Pavlak are now recovering at Beth Israel Deaconess.