Abstract

This article is based on the records of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, and deals with his administration’s repeated attempts to obtain the support of the Holy See to the president’s Central American policies, which were opposed in Congress by the Democratic minority, as well as by a large part of the US and international public opinion. They tried to obtain said support by replicating in the president’s public speeches the language used by the pope and conservative sectors of the Roman-Catholic church to define Liberation Theology and the grassroots realities sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. However, this strategy clashed at many points with the agenda of the Catholic Church in the Southern hemisphere. Despite many convergences of interests and the common anticommunist feelings of Reagan and John Paul II, the Holy See chose not to enter in a strategic alliance with Washington that would inhibit its global action, and the Vatican was not likely to change its stance simply to satisfy the United States.