Reagan took office in Jan 1981. He retained Brz as a consultant on Poland. Brz said: "We involved the Pope directly and he did whatever was to be done to sustain an underground effort. So Solidarity wasn't crushed." Reagan, son of a working-class Irish Catholic father and protestant mother, had won the lion's share of the Catholic vote. He was drawn to other Catholic working class types, like Bill Casey who became CIA Director. Like Reagan, they believed the Marxist-Leninist vision to be spiritually evil and had to be destroyed. Reagan openly forged ties with the Pope and Vatican. By spring 1981, Casey and others were dropping in at the residence of the pope's nuncio Archbishop Pio Laghi for breakfast and consultation. And Laghi visited the White House by the 'back door' for secret meetings with Casey and later the President.

Around 1982, Casey met with the pope at the Vatican and showed him a photo (taken a spy satellite) of the Pope's welcome when he visited Poland in 1979. The photo helped seal an informal secret alliance between the Holy See and the Reagan admin.  Western agencies, notably the CIA, provided regular secret briefings on developments in the USSR, Poland, Chile, Argentina, China, on liberation theology, Middle East etc.

EL SALVADOR: Archbishop Oscar Romero was a traditional prelate when appointed to his position in El Salvador in the 70s. What made him exceptional was his attention to the poor and disenfranchised in his congregation. He listened when they told him stories of family members kidnapped by government death squads when they tried to organize agricultural workers, or when they spoke out against government policies of repression. He looked at the pictures of the tortured bodies of civilians who opposed the repressive regime, and he wrote to the authorities asking for help to put an end to the fear and oppression in which his parishioners lived. When the government was unresponsive, he began to reflect on the need for these people to organize to obtain redress and change their situation. He realized that the conservative tradition of the Church in Latin America: allied to the plutocracy, catering to the rich, and helping the poor solely through the distribution of alms to those most needy, merely served to perpetuate injustice. He felt that the poor and powerless had the right to try and alter their situation through self-help organizations, through education and community action. He also felt that the Church had an obligation through its leadership to assist this process in concrete ways.

His efforts to serve the poor offended not only the repressive government and the upper classes, but even the Opus Dei who felt the Church was undermining their privileges. When he baptized Indian babies in the same baptismal font as the privileged white babies, they were outraged. His support of lay Catholic self-help groups was attacked as socialist activism. Vatican commissions on JPII's orders had visited Romero two times demanding that he explain his outspoken criticism of El Salvador s military rulers. 
Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador had pleaded fruitlessly with Carter to stop the US backing of repression - 6 weeks later, he was murdered in March 1980 as he stood in the pulpit, calling for an end to state violence against opposition groupst.

At his funeral, held on March 30, 1980 at the Cathedral, government troops opened fire on the overflow crowd. The massacre left 44 dead and hundreds wounded. Among the witnesses that day was Maryknoll lay missionary, Jean Donovan. A year later, Jean Donovan, along with two Maryknoll nuns Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, and Dorothy Kazel an Ursuline sister, were abducted, raped and shot to death by National Guardsmen. The next day peasants discovered their bodies alongside an isolated road buried in a shallow grave. Everyone familiar with the case knew that these women were killed by National Guardsmen and that it had to have been approved by the government.

Yet, when the Pope visited El Salvador in 1983, he purposely refused to address the murder of his bishop, or those of Jean Donovan and the nuns. He pointedly said the purpose of the Church was to teach that Jesus is the Son of God and provide spiritual counsel to the flock. Privately, he met with the priests and nuns in El Salvador and told them to discontinue their involvement with community self-help groups. He replaced the murdered Archbishop Romero with a conservative, giving him identical instructions in an effort to restore the Church to its former alliance with those in power--no matter how corrupt or complicit in organized violence for which the Church was notorious a century before.

NICARAGUA:  The day before the Pope's visit to Managua in 1983, 17 members of a youth organization who had been murdered by Samoza's soldiers were buried after a memorial program in the same plaza where the Pope John Paul II was to say Mass. The mothers and young people in attendance thought the Pope would refer to the deaths of these teenagers. He did not. Instead he demanded in a sermon that the people of Nicaragua abandon their untenable ideological commitments, and urged the bishops to be united. Many, still believing the Pope was truly on the side of the people, began to chant: A prayer for our dead and We want peace. The Pope ignored them and finished his sermon.  At the consecration, one of the mothers of the murdered boys broke in with a megaphone to say: Holy Father, we beg you for a prayer for our loved ones who have been murdered. The Pope, not only did not offer that prayer but skipped the Lord's Prayer as well with its tradition sign of peace. He offered Communion to a few dignitaries, gave the last blessing, and exited. It was a most unusual Mass. [See Ref 1 for Katherine Hoyt's account.]

Not long after, the liberal bishops were replaced by conservatives as the Pope encouraged by Ratzinger (who wrote a thesis on the subject) was shown alleged links between elements of liberation theology and Marxism. €œThe Pope began listening to those who were portraying liberation theology in caricatures€”priests with guns, Marxists€”and they just weren't accurate,4 said Dean Brackley, a theology professor at a Jesuit university in Latin America.