The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

‘Katy Perry, please stop,’ begged a nun. Then she collapsed and died.

She didn’t want the pop singer to buy her convent

By
March 12, 2018 at 12:00 p.m. EDT

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Avi Selk and Travis M. Andrews.

On Friday, March 9, Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, 89, looked into a camera and addressed pop star Katy Perry.

“Katy Perry, please stop,” the nun said on Fox 11 in Los Angeles.

She wanted the celebrity singer to stop trying to buy the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary’s convent.

Hours later, Holzman died.

The sale

The sisters have owned the sprawling Roman-villa style convent for 40 years, the Associated Press reported. Only a small handful of nuns were still alive when they vacated the complex several years ago, as the diocese looked for someone to buy it.

The buyers

That someone was Perry — known for “I Kissed a Girl” and this dress, among other things. The nuns did not approve.

“I found her videos and … if it’s all right to say, I wasn’t happy with any of it,” Sister Rita Callanan told the Los Angeles Times in 2015.

Claiming that the sisters, not the Vatican, had rights to the Los Feliz convent, Callanan and Holzman signed a contract with someone else. They agreed to sell the property to a restaurateur who promised to keep the convent open to the public — and pay $1 million more than the $14.5 million Perry was offering.

It was “a better deal,” Holzman told Fox 11 that year. “We’d control the money. [The archbishop] would get what he wanted, eventually.”

The archdiocese

The archdiocese took the sisters to court, and in 2016 won the right to sell to Perry.

The next year, Fox 11 reported, the restaurateur was convicted of malice and fraud and ordered to pay the archdiocese millions in damages for trying to interfere with the sale.

So Callanan and Holzman accompanied the restaurateur to bankruptcy court on Friday — as a show of support.

“We asked her to save us,” Holzman told the cameras outside the courthouse. The nuns had accepted that the legal system would not save their convent from being sold to a pop star, so they pleaded with the Vatican and Perry herself to take mercy.

Holzman later walked into a courtroom, collapsed and died.