(Coimbra) With his white Roman collar and his helmet screwed on his head, the Catholic priest Guilherme Peixoto, star of electronic music in Portugal, seeks to seduce young people and make the crowds dance to transmit the message of hope of the Church.
“I feel more like a priest thanks to electronic music!” confides the DJ priest, because music allows him, according to him, to reach out to an audience that does not usually attend churches.
“This allows me to take up the challenge that the Church gives us not to lock ourselves away, but rather to go towards others,” “Padre Guilherme”, as he is nicknamed in Portugal, explains to AFP.
This 50-year-old priest, with his round face and communicative gaze, with his dark glasses, stands out.
On Sunday mornings, he meets with his parishioners in Laundos, in northern Portugal. In front of a packed church, he celebrates mass in sneakers, with a green chasuble that he puts on over jeans.
But on the side, the priest leads a real life as an electro artist, swapping the altar for a mixing desk. He gives concerts all over the country and abroad, such as in Spain, Switzerland and Italy, where he performed this year in festivals and clubs.
His passion for music began at a very early age, but the idea of becoming a DJ came to him during a trip with Portuguese soldiers in Afghanistan, whom he accompanied as a military chaplain.
Mix for the Pope
Upon his return to Portugal, he wanted to improve his skills and so enrolled in a DJ school in Porto, in the north of the country.
He then realized the power of music to transmit the message of Christ, which according to him is “combined with all the beauty of the harmonies specific to electronic music.”
It allows us to highlight “the joy of the gospel, a message of hope and faith, but also of tolerance, harmony and peace,” adds this man of the church, much appreciated by his parishioners.
But his fame really exploded a year ago when he played in Lisbon in front of nearly a million and a half pilgrims from around the world, during Pope Francis’ closing mass for World Youth Day.
Today, when he arrives somewhere for a concert, the man who is followed by more than 900,000 people on Instagram is greeted like a rock star.
This was the case at the beginning of July in Coimbra, the large university city in central Portugal, where he got hundreds of young people dancing, mixing techno tracks with extracts from the speeches of John Paul II and Pope Francis.
“This priest is really cool!” says Andreia Borges, a 26-year-old woman who stops “Padre Guilherme” to take a selfie with him.
“He manages to bring together two worlds that seem to be polar opposites” and he is “very good at what he does,” says Filipe Barroso, a 32-year-old electronic music lover.