Sermon preached on the Occasion of Bishop Andrew’s Installation and Enthronement in the Bishopric of Cloyne

in the Cathedral Church of Saint Colman, Cloyne by

The Right Reverend Andrew Orr, Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross

14 October 2026

I’m a great believer that preachers should by and large preach on the lectionary. Grappling with the readings set for the day is good discipline and means we don’t just pick our favourite bits of scripture. But sometimes it is tricky, as is the case with the readings set for this evening. I could work with the first reading on the importance of Wisdom. But the second reading in which Jesus is betrayed by one of his closest friends seems unfortunate (to put it mildly) for the start of a new episcopal ministry. “One of you will betray me”. But there are resonances in that passage, as Jesus prepares for his death on the cross the following day, that I want to pick up on, later.

We are here tonight in Cloyne, a small but now rapidly growing town, as it becomes part of the wider Cork City commuter belt, which is partly why we all got stuck in traffic on the way here.

As you come into Cloyne, you can’t help but notice the round tower, which dominates the town, dating from the 10^th century and a tangible reminder of this site being originally a monastery, founded of course by St Colman in 560AD. There is some debate about the purpose of round towers, perhaps they originally served as bell towers, or as places of storage as we all learnt at school, where the monks could hide during raids by the Vikings. Whatever the truth, there is documentary evidence of Cloyne being raided by the Norsemen in 822, 824 and 885. So this was the kind of place that had every reason to be fearful of the future and fearful of those from abroad.

Which brings me to the Cross of Cloyne, which you will see reproduced on the front cover of your service booklet and which I chose as the design for my pectoral cross, which the parishes of the diocese very kindly gave to me.

The cross was found in the grounds of this Cathedral in the 1870s and is now in the National Museum of Ireland. It depicts four figures of Christ on its four arms and was probably attached to the cover of a Bible or gospel book. The style of the four figures enables us to date it to around 1100CE.

Around the legs are coiled and twisting serpents, familiar to us as distinctively Irish, from the book of Kells and many other manuscripts. But the figures are elongated and dressed in a kind of long kilt, distinctively Viking. It is a product of the coming together of two cultures, one native, one from abroad to create something distinctive and beautiful and of course distinctively Christian, symbolic of the power of the cross to heal and reconcile. The Vikings who after the raids on Cloyne settled in Ireland— in Dublin, in Waterford, in Cork, at Hlyfmandi on the Lee—married Irish Christians, learned the language, raised their children in the church, and buried their dead with Christian symbols.

So the cross at Cloyne, in the end, is a cross of reconciliation. It was forged in a world that had known real, bloody enmity between its peoples. Just a few generations after they had at been at war, frightened and fearful, the two cultures had assimilated in the power of the gospel.

Further, there was a second cross found in this area of East Cork, just a few kilometres from here, in a bog near Ballycotton. It is now, like many other treasures from across the world, in the British Museum. It dates from about the 9^th century, and again the style is distinctively Irish. But what makes it especially intriguing is that the centre is an oval of black glass, and inscribed in the black glass are two words in early Arabic. Sha[‘a] [a]llah (or ‘bismillah’?) or Tubna Ilallah. “What God wills” or “we have repented to God”.

We can speculate on how such an object might have ended up in Ballycotton, perhaps a trader from Europe or the Middle East who presumably dropped it by accident. But what do we make of such a hybrid piece—Irish and Arabic? Was it Christian and Islamic? Many Arabic speaking Christians use the name Allah for God. Was it someone secretly practising Islam in a Christian world, or vice versa? Or someone hedging their bets? Or was the glass set at the heart of the cross without the craftsman knowing anything about the inscription?

Tonight, I would like to see it as a symbol. Two faiths, meeting in one small object, at the point where the cross and the stone touch. It is a thing of astonishing beauty, and it poses a question to every one of us: can we hold firm in our own faith, and still honour the faith of another?

What does this say to us? The Christians of ninth and tenth century Ireland lived this out in ways we still barely credit. They were robbed and murdered by pagans, and they converted the newcomers not by the sword but by the sheer attractiveness of their faith: its learning, its hospitality, its holiness. Viking and Irish, Christian metalwork and Muslim glass, all meet in this part of East Cork. It reminds that the cross of Christ is at its heart is a symbol of reconciliation.  The crosses of Cloyne and Ballycotton tell us that the Church can suffer terribly at the hands of another people and still choose reconciliation. They tell us that faith is strongest, not weakest, when it can honour what is true and good in another tradition—that the craftsman did not lose his Christianity by setting a Muslim inscription at the centre of his cross; he proclaimed something deeper: that the God he worshipped is God over all peoples.

St. Paul writes “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and committing to us the ministry of reconciliation”. (2 Corinthians 5: 19) We gather tonight not primarily to show the Bishop to his seat, but as of first importance to worship the Christ who died for us to reconcile us to God and to each other.

All Ministry, episcopal, priestly, diaconal or of every baptised person marked with the cross, flows from that and is shaped by that task: to proclaim in word and action the ministry of reconciliation. The two crosses of East Cork are tangible parables in metalwork of the message of reconciliation that Christ has committed to each one of us.