Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest? — attributed to Henry II of England, 1170 A.D.

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Unlike Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury who excommunicated several bishops loyal to King Henry II 848 years ago, former House Chaplain Father Patrick Conroy didn’t earn the wrath of Speaker Paul Ryan by excommunicating Republicans.

Father Conroy earned the speaker’s enmity the old-fashioned way — by taking the Gospel seriously enough to offer a prayer from the floor of the House of Representatives that sounded subversive and downright offensive to ears long trained on the siren call of Mammon.

During his prayer, Father Conroy sought to impose the most impossible of Gospel standards on the representatives of a “Christian nation” — by admonishing them to remember the poor along with orphans and widows in their distress.

Father Conroy’s prayer last year came at a time when the Republicans were stitching together a regressive tax scheme that Jesus, and every other holy person that ever cared about people over profits, would have had all sorts of concerns about.

It was a prayer uttered at a time when Republicans were shifting the tax burden from the rich and placing responsibility for funding government squarely on the shoulders of those who occupied spaces far below them on the income ladder.

That’s one possible reason why the first Jesuit priest to lead the House was fired last week. It was a move so clumsy and unprecedented that it immediately triggered bipartisan outrage and a failed push to assemble a select committee to investigate the circumstances of the dismissal.

On Friday, Mr. Ryan, the outgoing speaker, tried to assure his caucus and many critics that he, a practicing Catholic, did not fire Father Conroy in the middle of his term for calling upon the legislators to give serious thought to what Jesus would do.

Other reasons were offered for unceremoniously kicking Father Conroy to the curb: It was too difficult for potential House penitents to make appointments with him. He’s not a dynamic preacher or speaker. He didn’t give enough spiritual succor to those traumatized or wounded by a would-be assassin during a congressional baseball practice last year.

What’s interesting is what’s missing from the official list of complaints: Father Conroy invited Muslims to pray on the floor of the House. The priest is also LGBT-friendly, which is just the kind of tolerance that could get a spiritual leader in trouble if he or she is surrounded by intolerant bullies. He also appears to be on the liberal end of Catholicism’s very big tent, which wasn’t apparent when he was appointed in 2011.

There has been some noise about the fact that many House members don’t believe a Catholic priest can relate to their daily struggles — especially if they have wives and children back home.

And let’s face it — many who belong to the Tea Party caucus will only unburden their spiritual concerns to a fellow evangelical or fundamentalist. A Catholic priest is a hard sell because he is already culturally distinct from the Protestant majority by virtue of celibacy, theology and cultural background, despite being strong allies on issues like abortion.

The fact that he was fired by a fellow Catholic is also galling, given how Mr. Ryan was once in the thrall of Ayn Rand, the atheist founder of Objectivism and author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” two of the most overrated, yet inexplicably influential books of the 20th century.

But there are enough Catholics and Protestants in both parties to be offended by what happened to Father Conroy last week. After all, he was the first Catholic chaplain to serve the House — yet he wasn’t able to finish his time. Now the pendulum will either swing back to the Protestants or to a Catholic who can somehow rise above the suspicions of the folks who didn’t like the last one.

Forget a Muslim or Jewish chaplain. That’s just never going to happen. In any case, whoever the next chaplain is will probably not be inclined to pray so blatantly on behalf of poor people. The only “separation of church and state” the current majority is interested in entails firing those silly enough to take a long ago crucified Palestinian rabbi seriously.

Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.

First Published: May 1, 2018, 4:00 a.m.