BOSTON (MA)
The Gavel – Boston College
FEBRUARY 16, 2016
BY ELLA JENAK
It was the winter of 1993, and Phil Saviano was scouring microfilm in Boston College’s O’Neill Library, feeding reel after reel into the reader, copying and printing articles that would prove especially useful in his investigation.
He began his search at the Boston Public Library, but BC’s extensive collection of Catholic publications and its copies of the Catholic directories proved to be the most revealing, both for Saviano’s research and later, for the investigations of The Boston Globe’s ‘Spotlight’ team.
“If the people who run this library knew what I was looking for,” he says, “they wouldn’t approve and they’d probably ban me from the library.”
Saviano’s eyes were scanning indexes that listed hundreds, thousands of articles, looking for a few key words: clergy abuse, sex abuse—the phrasing varied, but the story was the same. Priests in parishes across the country were abusing children with remarkable frequency. The mystery to Saviano was, “How could this be and why wasn’t anybody doing anything about it?”
“I was investigating, and trying to sort things out and get to the bottom of what I thought was a really big story,” he says. “It was as if I was one of those Spotlight team reporters.”
The back and forth rapport between Saviano’s own probing and that of The Boston Globe began when Saviano saw an article published in the paper on December 17, 1992—just a month before he began researching at Boston College—which reported that former Massachusetts priest David Holley had been arrested in New Mexico on charges of child molestation.
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