so......... this is gonna be a controversial post i bet.
yeah so, white people missionaries from the catholic church helped my country a lot back in those ages that our textbooks mentions foreign catholic people who devoted their lives to help us out, and some who even sacrificed their lives for our country.
but........ there were also quite some bad apples like the very first missionaries who fucking attacked a harbor and civilians to force catholicism to our country, and some who were puppets for china and what not.
so yeah we learn about how white catholic missionaries helped us during our dark ages, but also how they were fucking violent in the beginning. but nothing is mentioned about sexual abuse. and i have no religion so i don't know how long the catholic church has been hiding that shit but i want to know if that shit was common back then as well because i wish it wasn't. like idk, we have a whole chapter for great catholic men and women who built schools, hospitals, other helpful organizations, which most of them became top institutions in their fields. we also learn about missionary people who fought with us for our independence and tried to help diplomatic issues etc. and even though I'm not catholic, i am thankful for them but missionaries always bring a controversial discourse.
so i got to read a comment which was satirical saying the missionaries must have raped thousands of women and little boys cuz well you know. annnnnnnd after reading that it got stuck in my head and i kinda needed to know if well sexual abuse of catholic or other religious authorities were also big centuries ago.
In North America, the answer is a sad and resounding yes. Sexual abuse was endemic at the residential schools established by Christian missionaries throughout what is now the United States and Canada. As more and more territory was illegally annexed by these countries, they sought to assimilate the surviving Native populations through mandatory schooling. The most infamous figure associated with these schools in the United States is Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian School with the motto "Kill the Indian, save the man". Although many of the schools were federally funded, most of them were founded and operated by Christian missionaries of many different denominations, not just Catholicism. Their goal was to remove Native children from their families and assimilate them into white Christian culture. This involved cutting their hair, teaching them English and violently punishing them for speaking their native languages, severely restricting contact with their family, and training them for lower-class Euro-American economic tasks instead of their traditional lifestyles. In practice, this meant that children carried out child labour and were cut off from their families and cultures, causing a serious rupture in the passing down of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next.
The scale of this enterprise can't be understated; almost every Native person alive today has generational links to residential schools. The conditions the children were kept in were often horrible, with many dying from disease due to overcrowding, poor hygiene, and trauma. Sexual abuse was very common, often perpetrated by the missionaries. The intergenerational trauma this has caused for Native communities is in large part responsible for the very high rates of alcoholism, substance abuse, suicide, interpersonal violence, and other social problems many experience today. The last residential school in Canada didn't close until 1996. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has begun the process of more widespread discussion of the effects of residential schools on First Nations people, but in the United States the majority of people have no idea this happened.
This is obviously a very sad topic, but if you'd like to read more about it, here is a bibliography: https://web.archive.org/web/20160819230411/http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/Pages/residential-schools-bibliography-2009.aspx