If spoken by a contemporary politician, many of John Adams' comments about Catholics would render him or her unelectable. In 1765, he wrote that the "whore of Babylon" had falsely grabbed the "keys to heaven"; blasphemously claimed to convert wine into the blood of the Lord; and survived by keeping subjects in “sordid ignorance and staring timidity.”
Its hard to recognize freedom’s champion in this letter to Abigail in which he describes a visit to St. Mary's Catholic Church in Philadelphiaa. His pen dripping with contempt and pity, Adams catalogues the repellant customs: "The poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood, Their holy Water—their Crossing themselves perpetually—their Bowing to the Name of Jesus, whererever they hyertit – their Bowings, and Kneelings, and Genuflections before the Altar." He marveled at the power of the gaudy ritual to hypnotize. "But how shall I describe the Picture of our Saviour in a Frame of Marble over the Altar at full Length upon the Cross, in the Agonies, and the Blood dropping and streaming from his Wounds… Here is everything which can lay hold of the Eye, Ear, and Imagination. Every Thing which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant."
On August 12, 1765, the Boston Gazette published an essay again linking both churches to each other, and to tyranny. The essay argued that religious canon law – “extensive and astonishing” -- was created by the "the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order." Church law enslaved people by "reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity” and warned that only an educated populace could thwart the "direct and formal design on foot, to enslave America." Though it was not known at the time, Adams was the author.
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The reality is that John Adams, while certainly a great man for his vigorous championing of independence from Britain, was the stereotypical New Englander of his day -- uncomfortable and disdainful of everything out of the everyday experience of Massachusetts life: Protestant, Boston-centered. At the Continental Congress, he found everything about Philadelphia unbearable. When he had the opportunity to go to Europe, a situation in which Franklin and Jefferson drank deeply of the culture and were nearly universally loved and admired, Adams did nothing but complain. His inability to get along with other Americans not from New England was so extreme that, as second President of the US, he lost control of his own political party to Alexander Hamilton (and had as a result a mediocre, if not failed, one-term Presidency). It is in this context that his anti-Catholic remarks should be viewed (one should remember the treatment that Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Hunger received in Boston a few decades later).
And is there a reason why it would matter?
I was raised a Roman Catholic and went to Catholic school k to 10. Does telling the truth constitute bigotry? Though John Adam's words certainly would not describe the Church today I do believe they only reflected the Church as it actually was back then. How do I know this?....because the Church wasn't so much different from Adam's time to when I was growing up.
The English, for 200 years up until that point, had anti-Catholic propaganda rammed down their throats to such a point that it became nearly a inbred cultural trait. Washington, Jefferson, and the more aristocratic Founders saw it (the propaganda) for what it was, as opiate meant to keep the people docile and loyal to the king. The fact that Washington stamped out Guy Fawkes Day and people more or less forgetting about it shows has politically motivated England's anti-Catholicism was.
Adams was one of the greatest presidents that have every lived and he had every right to disagree with the Catholic church because there ARE things that are thought as others to be wrong. John Adams was a man greater than his time, it is because of him that I am a Republican. He is the best.
*Philidelphia has 1 a, not 2.
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