No, the Pope Didn’t Throw a Rave — But Grace Did Hit the Dance Floor
Pope Leo XIV — St. Elisabeth Cathedral, Košice, Slovakia • November 8, 2025
Artist links — Padre Guilherme: YouTube • Spotify / Godzone: YouTube • Spotify
The first synth line rolled across the square in front of St. Elisabeth Cathedral like a low, musical incense. Phones went up as LED screens lit with the calm face of Pope Leo XIV, his prerecorded greeting pouring through the PA over a pulsing beat while the Gothic façade of the largest church in Slovakia glowed under moving light. The clips that hit social media later sold it as “the pope threw a rave,” but on the ground in Košice, it looked more like what the Church has always done at its best: taking the language of a culture and letting the Gospel speak with that accent.
The outdoor electronic event was organized by the Archdiocese of Košice for the Jubilee of Young People and to honor the 75th birthday of Archbishop Bernard Bober, who leads the local church and has helped make St. Elisabeth Cathedral the visible heart of the city. Mass came first. The music came second. That order matters.
The sonic center of the night was Father Guilherme Peixoto — better known on posters and timelines as Padre Guilherme — a Portuguese parish priest and military chaplain who also happens to be a techno DJ. Since the pandemic, he’s been streaming sets, raising funds for parish needs, and then stepping onto bigger stages, from World Youth Day Lisbon to festival slots where he can drop everything from Marian melodies to a “Super Mario Bros.” remix without losing the thread of his vocation.
His sets blend four-on-the-floor kicks with choral samples, church bells, and scraps of spoken word. According to his own artist bio, he believes that “electronic music is a privileged way to build a better world,” because it pulls strangers into one shared, respectful space on the dance floor. That conviction runs through the way he talks about his ministry on Catholic Vibe and in his YouTube Music profile.
In Košice, the night’s sound followed the pattern of his recent shows: long, patient builds, crowd-pleasing drops, and melodic lines that feel closer to adoration than to hedonism. An unreleased track stitched around the pope’s greeting — “Dear young people…” — became the emotional spine of the set. A highlight video from the Košice night shows the moment the papal voice cuts through the bass, not as a gimmick but as a kind of preached refrain.
Setlist and pacing
No official setlist has been posted for the Košice night, but the arc lines up with what we already know from Padre Guilherme’s catalog on Spotify and his prior performances.
He tends to open with slower-building techno, giving a mixed crowd — pilgrims, locals, curious bystanders — time to acclimate to both the music and the idea of a priest behind decks. Then come the more recognizably “Catholic” moments: tracks that fold in bell sounds, chant-like vocals, or short phrases of prayer. His recent studio releases like “Integral Ecology” and the worship-heavy material documented on his official channels give a good sense of the palette he draws from.
The Košice set was framed by the liturgy. Archbishop Bober presided at Mass in the same cathedral whose nave has held worshippers since the late 1400s, as confirmed by the city’s own history of Saint Elizabeth’s Cathedral. Only after the Eucharist did the party spill fully into the square. That rhythm — altar first, then dance floor — is not a novelty. It echoes the ancient Catholic instinct that feast flows from sacrifice, and that joy, if it’s going to last, has to be rooted in something deeper than bass.
Crowd and context
This wasn’t a random booking slapped in front of a pretty church for vibes. The event grew out of a deliberate youth focus: a Jubilee gathering that brought thousands of young Catholics into the city center, with the Church’s cultural instincts shaped by movements like the Slovak Godzone Project, which has spent years using concerts, media, and testimony to evangelize a post-communist generation. Coverage of their growing influence notes that they now draw tens of thousands across Central Europe through tours that mix worship music and multimedia staging. Recent reports describe crowds of 37,000 on the latest Godzone evangelization tour.
At the center of Košice, the physical setting carried its own theological weight. St. Elisabeth Cathedral isn’t just an Instagram backdrop, it’s the largest church in Slovakia, big enough to hold over 5,000 people. A classic example of High Gothic architecture in the country. Tour guides call it the “heart and center” of the city, and even secular sites like slovakia.com describe it as one of the nation’s key spiritual landmarks.
Into that context stepped the pope — not in person, not with headphones on his head, but via a video message beamed across LED screens. In the text of the address released with the event, he greeted the young people gathered before the cathedral as “a beating heart of faith and hope,” called them to fraternity and peace, and closed with a simple, resonant “amen.” The DJ took that “amen” and wove it into the last part of the set. Catholicism, as ever, found a way to sacramentalize even a closing drop.
Standout moments
There are a few images from the night that will probably stick around long after the discourse dies.
The first is the obvious one: the pope’s face on the giant screen, framed by stone towers and moving lasers. It’s the same priest we’ve seen giving addresses in synod halls, now speaking to a square full of kids in hoodies, families, religious sisters, and older parishioners who have been praying in that plaza for decades. In a way, it’s just the digital version of what popes have done for centuries — sending messages to local churches — but the visuals captured in the Košice highlight reel made it feel Pentecostal and slightly surreal.
The second is more subtle: that sampled “amen.” It was a small production choice, but a deeply Catholic one. In Scripture and tradition, “amen” is the people’s assent to what God is doing — it’s the sound of trust. Hearing that word stretched and echoed across a dance track turned the crowd’s movement into something like a physical assent. Nobody stopped dancing to pull out a catechism. They didn’t need to. Their bodies, their cheers, their staying put in that square were already a reply.
The third is the building itself. Tourist sites like Visit Košice urge visitors to climb the tower and see the carvings up close. On this night, almost nobody was climbing. They were facing the façade from the square, watching color and shadow play across stone that has survived wars, occupations, and ideological whiplash. In Catholic terms, beauty did its job: it drew people’s attention to something older and sturdier than the algorithm.
Openers and production
Before the priest-DJ took over, the evening leaned into a more familiar form of Catholic praise. Slovakia’s Godzone ministry — which has become known for arena-scale worship events and a growing discography on YouTube Music and Spotify — opened with guitar-driven worship and testimony. Their official channels and coverage in outlets like Catholic World Report describe a movement that is both widely fruitful and occasionally controversial for its contemporary style.
The production budget was closer to festival than parish picnic. The stage setup, as seen in the official Košice highlight video, included full lighting rigs, lasers, LED walls, and a PA powerful enough to fill a European city square. But the tech wasn’t there just for spectacle. The screens carried the pope’s message and close-ups of the altar earlier in the evening. The lights, for all their “rave” aesthetics, framed arches, statues, and windows that long predate EDM.
Behind the electronics is a very old Catholic idea: inculturation. Documents like Evangelii Gaudium talk about the Gospel taking flesh in every culture, including its music. Košice was a live experiment in that principle — a test of whether techno, lasers, and a medieval cathedral can all point toward the same Christ.
Counterpoint/limitation
So did the pope “throw a rave”? No. Not in any serious sense.
He didn’t book the talent, run the soundcheck, or stand behind the decks. The organizing belonged to the local church: the Archdiocese of Košice, the diocesan youth offices, and partners like Godzone. The Vatican’s role was to support, encourage, and bless. As biographies of Padre Guilherme make clear, this is his lane — a priest with a specific charism for electronic music and evangelization — not a sudden pivot in papal hobbies.
Still, Church leaders shouldn’t be surprised that cameras captured a DJ set, lasers, a pope on screen, and a young crowd, and the internet mutated that into “Holy Father throws rave.” That’s how social media works. Nuance dies first.
The real questions for Catholics live elsewhere:
Was the sacred space treated as sacred, with the Eucharist and the message of Christ at the center rather than the optics?
Will events like this draw people deeper into parish life, confession, and the sacraments, or will they remain one-off spectacles?
Are local churches catechizing as seriously as they are staging events?
The Church has some guardrails here. The same Evangelii Gaudium that pushes for bold, missionary creativity also warns against empty show and spiritual worldliness. The tradition on inculturation insists that while forms can change, the content — Christ crucified and risen, the call to conversion and holiness — cannot. Košice looked, from the available evidence, like an attempt to stay on the right side of that line. But it’s a line that will need guarding every time a sanctuary turns into a stage.
Afterglow
By the time the last kick faded and the square began to empty, St. Elisabeth Cathedral was still there, stone-steady, ready for early Masses the next morning. The lasers went dark… the bells stayed.
What lingers is not a meme about “the rave pope,” but the sight of young Catholics dancing in front of a medieval cathedral while a priest-DJ built a track around a papal blessing. In an age that keeps trying to confine the Church to museums or political shouting matches, Košice offered a different image: a Church willing to step into the sound of its time without surrendering the substance of its faith.
No, the pope didn’t throw a rave. He did something older and stranger, something deeply Catholic: he spoke Christ’s blessing over his people and let that word become part of the beat, trusting that the same Spirit who once inspired monks to chant in echoing choirs can also stir a generation whose prayer sometimes starts with a drop.
