The video of a father playing techno music in a massive event full of priests, priests and young people has quickly gone viral on the internet. He wears a black short-sleeved shirt, a clerical collar, and moves his hands to the rhythm of the beat. He is raised on a platform that presides over Tejo Park, on the outskirts of Lisbon, with hundreds of thousands of pilgrims as audience. He’s behind a structure with a Prisoneer mixer surrounded by a bunch of cabling and the scene looks like something out of any standard festival, venue or club with techno programming.
The curious thing, in addition to the songs that the protagonist plays, is the environment where he does it. Guilherme Peixoto is the DJ priest who captures all eyes with the viralization of the video where he is seen DJing at this year’s World Youth Day (WYD) held in Lisbon: it is not an after party, but a session to wake up the young Christians on the closing day of the rally.
Peixoto’s goal is to convey a message of peace and joy to connect the youth of generation Z with the message of the church through his music. With a style that he himself calls “melodic techno” and his own label, Luz Aeterna Recuerdos, he combines electronic songs with phrases said by Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis and excerpts from the Bible. He became known, above all, with the live online sessions that he did during the coronavirus pandemic, where he was followed by thousands of viewers. This 2023 Peixoto is doing an international tour with more than twenty performances.
Guilherme Peixoto (Guimaraes, 1975) is a Portuguese priest known for his DJ sets. He entered the seminary at the age of 13 and has always been linked to Catholicism without neglecting his passion for music: he was part of a popular singing group, a pop-rock band and currently tours the world doing DJ sessions that bring together a large number of spectators. His career as a DJ began in 2006 with the opening of a bar next to the parish he was in charge of to raise funds, Ar de Rock Laúndos, in the town of Laúndos (Portugal). As he became known, he enrolled in a DJ school where he claims to have made a qualitative leap; now it gathers more than 10,000 people in its sessions.
World Youth Day (WYD) is an annual event promoted by the Catholic Church and dedicated to young people from all over the world, which is celebrated every two or three years in a city chosen by the Pope. It is a pilgrimage that celebrates the evangelization of young people and the first edition was in 1986 in Rome. This year, it was held on the outskirts of Lisbon from August 1 to 6 and the closing mass of Pope Francis, where Peixoto previously played, has brought together more than 1.5 million pilgrims, according to the organization.
