BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe

September 1, 2019

By Sarah Wu

When Susan Pavlak flew from Minnesota to Boston a decade ago to donate her kidney, she did not expect to meet the recipient. But a month before the surgery, she agreed to meet Phil Saviano for lunch, which was the first of many meals they shared as their friendship grew stronger over the years.

“He has my kidney, but that’s not why we’re friends. That’s just how we met,” Pavlak said during an interviewlast week in Saviano’s Roslindale home.

The two had something else in common other than organ donor and recipient: They are both survivors of clergy sexual abuse.

Saviano, 67, was a whistleblower on the sexual abuse crisis in Massachusetts and played a prominent role in the Globe’s Spotlight investigation, published in 2002.

In 1992, in an interview with the Globe, he told the public about the…