New Allegation Made Against Msgr. Harris : Declaration: Ex-Mater Dei student says the priest touched him sexually in 1979. He agrees to be a witness for another alumnus who has made a similar claim and filed suit.

For 16 years, it was a secret known only to Mark Curran, a few of his relatives and the closest of friends.

Then last week, the Santa Ana tile setter read news reports that Msgr. Michael Harris, the popular founding principal of Santa Margarita High School, had been accused of molesting two boys when he was principal at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana.

Then he saw John Barnett, Harris’ attorney, blast the priest’s accusers on television as two sick individuals.

“That Barnett guy came on and basically made mincemeat out of those two guys,” Curran, 30, said.

So Curran, married with a 3-year-old daughter and a baby on the way, decided to come forward with his own allegation about Harris.

“I didn’t really want to get involved in this,” said Curran, who still lives just a few blocks from Mater Dei. “I work 60 hours a week. I have a new baby coming. But my brother, my friends, my wife’s mother, they said, ‘ You got to do it, Mark.’ They told me, ‘ We can’t do it.’ ”

Curran, who says he has no interest in suing Harris, has signed a declaration detailing his allegation against the priest and has agreed to serve as a witness for David Price, 29, the Mater Dei alumnus whose civil suit alleging that Harris had molested him led to the public disclosure that another former Mater Dei student had made similar allegations before his death of AIDS last year.

“He heard all these people bashing these two guys that had been harmed,” said William Paoli, one of Price’s attorneys at the Irvine office of attorney Theodore Wentworth. “He decided to come forward despite any personal embarrassment it might cause him.”

Paoli and Wentworth said they will call Curran as a witness, and on Wednesday filed his declaration with the court having jurisdiction over Price’s suit.

Barnett, Harris’ attorney, said he was not aware of Curran’s allegations. “I don’t know who Mr. Curran is, or who he told. But we will certainly investigate his allegations,” he said, adding, “allegations like these do not come without consequences.”

For Curran, the recent allegations about Harris are at once vindication and a painful unearthing of something that he alleges occurred when he was a scrawny, 5-foot-2 freshman who believed Harris was “what Jesus Christ would be like if he was here on Earth.”

For years, Curran said, he has viewed his alleged betrayal by Harris as the moment when he was yanked into the adult world and as a secret he could not tell church authorities or his devout mother--”a Catholic’s Catholic.” Besides, Curran asks, who do you turn to when the man you viewed as the ultimate authority wrongs you?

“I knew no one would believe me,” Curran said. “I was a 14-year-old kid. I didn’t want that tag hanging over me.”

But from his declaration written last Thursday, this is what Curran alleges happened:

Curran was a freshman at Mater Dei, the third of four brothers to attend the school. At his eldest brother’s urging, Harris had helped Curran, not the best of students, get into the school.

“Once in,” Curran alleged in the declaration, he and Harris “spent five days a week together, maybe three to 10 hours a day. Lots of times we went to the beach or dinner.”

Harris took Curran to a convention of priests at the Anaheim Convention Center, where Harris spoke, Curran recalled. “I saw a huge change in my life for the better, and formed a desire to become a priest someday,” Curran said.

Then one night in 1979, as the pair were sitting on the couch watching a Gene Kelly movie at Harris’ church-owned home on Batavia Street in Orange, Curran contends, Harris “suddenly . . . leaned over, his face right beside mine, less than six inches away and he placed his hand on my penis. He didn’t just lay it there, he grabbed it to manipulate it.”

Curran alleges that he jumped up and asked Harris, “ ‘What the heck is going on here?’ I wanted to run and he said, ‘Did that bother you?’ I said, ‘Yes, you better believe it bothered me, and I want to get out of here. I want to go home.’ ”

Curran contends that Harris offered to drive him home, but he ran out and walked to a nearby hospital where he called friends to come and take him home.

In his declaration, Curran said his “admiration for Father Harris had been so great” that he told no one except his best friend, Mike McChesney. “I couldn’t tell anyone else because I didn’t want to burst their bubble, and I was embarrassed and I didn’t understand,” Curran said.

McChesney, who urged Curran to come forward, remembers Curran telling him about the alleged incident.

“There were tears in his eyes,” McChesney recalled. “At first, my reaction was disbelief. Father Harris was an idol to Mark. Mark wanted to be a priest because of him.”

Soon after, his family and friends remember, Curran began to lash out. Curran said he begged his mother to take him out of Mater Dei. When she wouldn’t, he and a couple of friends vandalized the school with brown paint, even painting “Mark was here” on Curran’s locker.

“From my conduct, Father Harris knew I wanted to get out of the school,” Curran said in his declaration. Six weeks later, after Curran refused to do homework and insulted all of his teachers, he was expelled, he said.

“I didn’t want to be a priest anymore. I didn’t want to go to the school anymore. I just wanted out of there,” Curran said.

Curran said he didn’t tell anyone else until he started dating his wife, Wilhelmine, when he was 17. Then he told his brother, Mike, when he was 20. In the mid-1980s, he told a few friends he worked with.

Dan Werdel, 37, said Curran first told him his allegations about Harris when the pair were tiling homes together in 1987.

“He just came out and told me,” remembered Werdel, also a Mater Dei graduate. “I think it has personally troubled him a bit.”

Werdel, a longtime Curran family friend, said Curran could never have told his devout Catholic parents, who still live just down the street from him. “There’s certain things you don’t discuss in that family. That’s uncharted territory.”

Mike Curran said his brother Mark told him his allegations shortly after Mark got out of the Army.

“He didn’t want to tell my mom because it would break her heart,” Mike Curran, 36, remembered. Harris had lived with the family’s cousins in Orange for a short time when he was still a seminary student, Mike Curran said.

Then, in 1987, Mark Curran said in his declaration, he angrily blurted out his allegations to his staunchly Catholic in-laws one day as they gushed over Harris’ fund-raising efforts for Santa Margarita High School.

“I was scorned. (His mother-in-law) came unglued,” Curran remembered. “They said, ‘No way. You’re making that up.’ ”

Nellie Schuurmans, Curran’s mother-in-law, admits she didn’t believe her son-in-law when he made his allegations.

“I doubted it,” remembered Schuurmans, a Catholic for 66 years until she recently began attending Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa. “But he had no need to lie. Who would say something like that about a priest?”

After the new allegations became public last week, Schuurmans said, she finally believed her son-in-law.

“Now, after so many years, now that I’m older, I believe it,” Schuurmans said. “At the time he told me, there was not such a thing as coming forward. When I heard (the new allegations), I said to Mark, ‘You have to report it.’ ”

Curran said he didn’t tell his mother until she sent him articles in March when the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange announced that allegations of sexual improprieties had been made against Harris.

“She made a comment about how Father Harris is being so mistreated in the newspaper,” Curran said. “I said, ‘Mom, Father Harris did some things that were not right to your own son.’ ”

Curran said he has long since come to terms with what happened to him: “I’m not a wounded soldier.” But coming forward has been painful. “I basically buried it all. Now, it’s bringing it all back to the surface.”