Legal Question in Civil Litigation in California

Re: LDS missionary broke up my engagement by inappropriate relations and breakin

I sympathize with your predicament, but I'm afraid the law doesn't offer you any remedies.

The common law used to recognize a tort for "alientation of affection." California did away with this tort many years ago, although it might still be recognized in some other jurisdictions. This tort allowed a husband whose wife left him for another man to sue the man who had interfered in his marriage, but it did not apply to couples who were only engaged and thus would not have helped you.

I'm also afraid I don't see a negligence claim here, because even if the church was negligent in allowing the housing situation here, the deliberate actions of your ex-fiancee and of the missionary broke any causal chain. In other words, your loss was the result of the decisions of your ex-fiancee, and not of any negligence by the church that might have happened earlier.

This means that you seem to have no recourse against the individual missionary who was involved with your fiancee. It also seems to mean you have no recourse against the church, because the church is only liable for the actions of its agents (and I will assume that he was an agent of the church, although the facts might prove otherwise) if the agents themselves would have been liable. Because the missionary would not be liable, the church wouldn't be, either.

Additionally, the missionary would have to be acting within the course and scope of his role as an agent of the church, and it is not at all clear to me that you could make such a showing here.

A further issue is that you seem to want to hold the church accountable for not properly applying its own rules. Ordinarily, evidence that an organization failed to apply its own rules can be used to establish negligence; as we have seen, however, you don't seem to have a viable claim and the evidence thus wouldn't get you anywhere. Besides, the separation of church and state would make courts very unwilling to tell a religion how to properly apply its own religious rules (as opposed to, say, safety rules). This is yet another serious obstacle to your claim.

Unfortunately, I'm afraid you have no remedy here. I'm sorry I can't offer more encouragement.