Was John Adams an Anti-Catholic Bigot?

Let's face it, John Adams had a big mouth. I would have loved to have had a couple beers with him. I suspect it would have been like drinking with Pat Buchanan :). Every American historian should thank their lucky stars for John Adams.

The fact that his anti-catholic bias posed zero threat to his candidacy, while conversely the implications of Jefferson's agnosticism nearly cost him the election of 1800 should tell all we need to know about the pulse of 18th century political mind. Bashing Catholics was all the rage - perhaps more among politicians than the common man.

I guess the fact that all of the southern signers of the declaration of independence were slave owners would pretty much eliminate them from running for any office today as well. And they physically bashed what they considered "chattel". Lets try to keep things in historical perspective.

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).

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.

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.