[Loy]

Whilst it's true that relations between the Sandinistas and the church eroded (though nowhere near as badly as you're suggesting)....well, fuck it. Just to make it easier (because I am a lazy bastard, after all), I pulled out Rhomas Bokenkatter's "Concise History Of the Catholic Church". Here are some interesting passages for you-

"While the church officially supported the Somoza regime, certain parts of the church became revolutionary as early as 1972. These were members of Chrictian Base Communities who bnegan to identify liberation of the people with the armed struggle being led by the Sandinistas. They had been radicalized after the terrible earthquake of 1972 when they saw how Somoza and his cronies used the humanitarian funds contributed from abroad to enrich themselves.

The importance of the participation of these Christian Base Communities can hardly be exaggerated. As one sociologist put it, 'the Nicaraguan revolution was fostered and succeeded because of the presence of a strong network of secondary organizations-the Christian Base Communities, many of which were formally established...but many more grew spontaneously carrying Christians into the revolution without formal church approval'

Basically, Christian Base Communities were little housing systems set up for poor people to work and live together. The rise of the communities coincided with the theft from the people by Somoza ("our son of a bitch", as Kennedy once put it), which was happening in tandem with the growing popularity of Liberation theology. So let's put this all together-a radicalization of theological beliefs, combined with the pillaging of a populace by its "leaders", and an organization which was bent on overthrowing the corrupt system....what happened was that the church actually became the breeding ground of the people who supported the Sandinistas.

Now, it was mentioned that there wasn't any official church sanctioning of this all. Well, this boils down to the theological tet-a-tet between the instigators of Liberation Theology and Cardinal Ratzinger (now more popularly known as "His Holiness, the Pope"). The problem? Ratzinger was bothered by LT's call for a "looser structure of the church", which he felt would weaken the position of the church as an authority. Ratzinger was also bothered by LT's active cooperation with groups that could easilly be seen as Marxist.

However, pope John Paul never had any problems with LT. In fact, after Ratzinger had punished a few LT expousers to silence, the Pope withdrew it, and put out a critique of LT that was fairly positive (the only problems the Pope had with LT was what he saw as "slight" (his words) exagerations of scriptural interpretation). As far as the Pope and LT, he saw LT as being, on the theological level, correct.

So now begs to question, since it's been pointed out that the Church didn't really have any problems with LT, why would they be pouring money into the RC church to "fight the Sandys"? Simple, these "churches" we were throwing money to weren't RC at all, but used the name for advertising purpose.

AS far as the grenades thing....you are aware that the "counting with grenades" thing was actually a piece of disinformation that was to be disseminated to the US with the express purpose of making the Sandy's look bloodthirsty, and that every journalist who saw it and knew anything about what was going on in Nicaragua knew it for what it was, and that it's used to this day to teach journalism students about knowing all aspects of a story, lest you look like a fool the same way the morons who tried to pass this off as authentic did, right? Hell, the CIA admitted it in testimony to congress. I'm suprised you didn't know about it, Bink.

As far as What Reagan knew.....no, there isn't a paper trail. There i, however, eyewitness accounts and circumstantial evidence pointing to Reagans forknowledge aboutwhat Falwell was up to (hell, Fallwell bragged about it. Now, you can call Falwell many things, but "straight-out liar" isn't one of them. "Straight-out liar", on the other hand, is one of MANY terms one can use about Reagan.)