The recent Catholic conversion of Carrie Prejean Boller, former Miss California. Originally from a Protestant background, she delved deeper into her faith and discovered that the early Church was different—it was Catholic.

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The former Miss California received Catholic baptism at Easter 2025.

Her name is Carrie Prejean Boller and a few weeks ago she publicly shared for the first time the reason for her conversion, a truly interesting journey. She called it “the greatest blessing of life”.

 

Carrie Prejean Boller and the revocation of Miss California

Carrie had always been an evangelical Christian and her case became international in 2009 when, during the Miss USA final, she was asked what she thought about the duty of all states to legalize marriage between people of the same sex.

The young model dared to state that she considered marriage to be the union between a man and a woman but the answer sparked furious controversy to the point that her title as Miss California USA was even revoked.

 

Raised Protestant

But this is not what Carrie spoke about on the podcast with Lila Rose.

Rather she told of her Catholic mother and her Southern Baptist father, who prevailed in the children’s religious upbringing. Then the parents divorced and the mother ended up becoming Protestant herself.

“I was very involved in Bible studies, in the Scriptures”, but after Covid something changed. “I asked myself: ‘Why am I Protestant? What am I protesting?’ And I realized: I am protesting against the Catholic Church. So I began to study.”

The research started with Martin Luther, discovering that he believed that Mary was the Mother of God while Protestants today refuse to do so.

And then the teaching of the early Church: “Did a ‘Church of the origins’ really exist or did my faith only arise in the 16th century, with the Protestant Reformation? Why are there 40,000 different denominations?”.

Reflections that led the former Miss California to realize that she was moving from one Protestant church to another and each of them “had, in fact, its own little ‘magisterium’: every pastor acted like a little pope, interpreted Scripture in his own way, decided doctrines, eschatology, theological principles”.

Another traumatic experience was attending prosperity gospel churches, known for being centered on wellbeing, health and wealth. She took her father, who had cancer, to a “healing night” and “it was terrible”, she recalls. “They laid hands on him saying: ‘You are healed’, and he stopped wanting to have the operation that could have saved his life.”.

The more she got involved with Protestant reality the more “inside me grew the conviction that there had to be something deeper”.

 

The study of the early Church

Carrie also made the “mistake” of studying the early Church, noticing that “everything was centered on the Eucharist. It was the heart of the Church. There was one Church, united, beautiful”.

Yet she only sporadically received the Eucharist in one of the churches she attended and, when it happened, “it was just a symbol, they said, something that had no real meaning”.

Another day she made a second “mistake”: entering a Catholic church.

“I remember that as soon as I crossed the threshold I was overwhelmed. Not only by the beauty of the place, but by a deep sense of holiness. I had never felt anything like that entering a Protestant church, which are more like coffee shops”. Instead, “I felt the Real Presence of the Lord. And I thought: ‘This church was not born yesterday. Here are centuries of history, of tradition’”.

 

“The Bible is not enough, now I rest in the truth”

Catholics, Carrie says, have the community, the Eucharist and the Holy Spirit who guides the teaching authority in the line of apostolic succession, instituted by Jesus Christ.

“I knew the Bible”, adds the former Miss California, “we Protestants relied only on that, but it could not be enough. One also had to ask: who interprets Scripture? The pastor? And what are his credentials?”.

In 2025 Carrie Prejean Boller began the catechumenate that led her to baptism during the Easter Vigil.

“Now I can finally rest in the truth that I did not invent, but that has been guarded by the Church for twenty centuries”.