Sister Rita Callanan best friend of many decades, Sister Catherine Rose Holzman, who was also part of the legal battle, collapsed and died during a court appearance on March 9, 2018.
The 89-year-old nun's last words, according to Sr. Callanan, were "Katy Perry. Please stop."
“I really didn’t like Katy Perry. I’m sure she doesn’t like me,” Sr. Callanan told the New York Post in a recent interview.
The only sister of the Order of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, still alive, the 81-year-old sister told the paper that she thinks Katy Perry has “blood on her hands."
Shortly before Sr. Holzman's death, the nuns released a documentary chronicling the legal saga.
The nuns were tormented by the court case, which began in 2015 when they attempted to sell the Mediterranean-style villa in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, where they had lived for decades until being kicked out in 2011, to businesswoman Dana Hollister.
After the property’s sale, the archdiocese intervened and called Hollister's offer a fraud, claiming that the nuns did not have the authority to sell the property.
Nun embroiled in Katy Perry legal conflict dies at 89 https://t.co/TKozws62Fb pic.twitter.com/29tjxk7e7D
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) March 10, 2018
There have been varying accounts of how the sisters claimed rights to the 30,000 square-foot villa, which had served as their convent, with some sources stating that they had pooled their money to purchase it back in the 1970s, generating sufficient funds by permitting production teams to use it as a filming location, and others suggesting that a devout Catholic had left it to them in his will.
The Los Angeles archdiocese, however, ruled that it was still the archdiocese's property, and agreed to sell it to Katy Perry for $14.5 million. The nuns claimed that was $1 million less than the price Hollister had agreed to.
They also argued that they were "being forced to violate" their vows by selling their convent to Perry.
In an email correspondence sent from Sister Holzman to Archbishop Jose Gomez, she wrote: "In selling to Katy Perry, we feel we are being forced to violate our canonical vows to the Catholic Church."
In 2016, Judge Stephanie Bowick ruled that the sale was invalid and awarded Perry and the archdiocese damages of $15 million.
Callanan has since acknowledged that the sisters did not want the villa sold to Perry in particular because they did not approve of her image.
Nuns are refusing to sell Katy Perry their convent for "obvious reasons," court paper says: http://t.co/5LHozk7ilU pic.twitter.com/N4rhVsLmDr
— Slate (@Slate) July 27, 2015
'We asked Dana [Hollister] to buy our property as we didn't want it to go to Katy Perry. Yes, we put the wheels in motion to sell our property," she said, while also pointing out that "it wasn’t legal for Katy Perry to buy [it] either.”
Perry has since decided that she does not want the property; it is back on the market now for $25 million.
Sr. Callanan told the Post that poor treatment by the Archdiocese has continued, recalling that she was not permitted to speak at Sr. Holzman's funeral, despite her family requesting it. Currently recovering from major spinal surgery in a rehab facility, she said that she does not know where she will live once her rehab concludes.
“The Archdiocese doesn’t understand what they have done to these women, [or] just how devastated [the nuns] were when they kicked them out and really destroyed their community,” a source told the paper.
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