During his tour of Mexico last week, Pope Francis delivered an apology for the “mistreatment” of the country’s indigenous people. Sadly, the pontiff’s offering did not even begin to right the atrocities of the past.

The Catholic Church’s role in the subjugation of indigenous people of the Americas began with the first missionaries. Christopher Columbus set sail looking for more than a new world. He believed he was ordained by God to forcefully conquer the isles of the Caribbean. The Spanish conquistadors engaged in the most violent forms of Catholic proselytizing, including enslavement, wiping out indigenous languages, land theft, mass murder and genocide.

The trails blazoned with native blood by these first Catholic missionaries became paths toward the rise of religious imperialism. The church carried on the mission to conquer and civilize the indigenous people of the Americas by replacing their “savage gods” with the cross. Indigenous people were either coerced or lured into adopting their conquerors’ corrupt values, including greed, lust, violence and hate.

The pontiff’s shallow apology is extremely disturbing for a number of reasons. First, the apology implies that the legacy of brutal Christian conquest is left somewhere in the dust of history. In fact, this terrible religious trauma has touched every generation of indigenous people since those early days of conquest.