It is pretty unusual for an archbishop’s birthday to be celebrated in a public event that takes over an entire city square. It is practically unheard of for that celebration to take the form of a rave.
But in November 2025, when the Archbishop of Košice, Bernard Bober, turned 75, the square in front of St Elisabeth Cathedral was converted into an outdoor dancefloor. The acclaimed DJ, Padre Guilherme – a Portuguese priest, Fr Guilherme Peixoto,– was in charge of the tunes. Overlooked by the gothic spires of the cathedral, the crowd readied for a remarkable evening.
And then, to their astonishment, Pope Leo XIV appeared on the screen. He began to speak:
Dear young people, with joy I greet you, as you gather before this splendid cathedral of Košice, which is a beating heart of faith and hope. Coming from different nations, but united by the same faith, your presence is a tangible sign of the fraternity and peace that is instilled in our hearts by friendship with Christ.
The music began to rise as the Pope continued:
I impart to you my apostolic blessing and entrust each of you to the protection of the Virgin Mary, the mother of the church, and queen of peace. May the blessing of almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit come upon you, and remain with you always.
As his ‘Amen’ echoed across the city square, Padre Guilherme “dropped the beat.” The laser show kicked in, and the rave began with a tune that sampled some of Pope Leo’s most inspirational quotes.
Dance in the History of the Church
Dance, of course, is not alien to Christianity. Who can forget that ‘David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might’ (2 Samuel 6:5 NRSVACE) when the ark of the covenant was carried up to Jerusalem. Or we can think of how, in the last generation especially, the Trinitarian relationship has been conceived in terms of a dance. Jurgen Moltmann, one of the key figures in this movement, explicitly unpacks the space-making, inter-penetrating movement of the Father with the Son with the Spirit as ‘the eternal feast of heaven and earth. This is the dance of the redeemed.’[1]
Although commonly a topic of mockery, the liturgical dance tradition is a contemporary expression of the important role that dance can play in the practice of the church. This is a mode of engagement with the Scriptures, typically as part of a public worship service, that explores the meaning of a text through embodiment.[2]
There have been times in the history of Christianity when the church had a more ambivalent relationship towards dance. One thinks of the medieval dancing manias, like the one which infamously struck Aachen in 1374. Seized by a compulsion beyond explanation, frenzied crowds found they could not stop dancing short of collapsing through exhaustion. ‘Witnesses had claimed,’ explains John Waller, ‘that the poor dancers had been laid open to Satan’ because of the failure of priests to live up to their sanctified calling.[3]
But as Laura Hellsten has argued, even in the medieval church, there was space for a positive reception of dance. Reinterpreting an earlier strand of scholarship that perhaps overlooked the events in the life of the medieval church that might centre around dance, she finds in the festivities and celebrations of the parish, a receptivity to dance as an embodied expression of faith. Her claims are richly supported by reference to contemporaneous artwork which, more than set liturgical texts, can ‘directly tell something to us’ about what people believed.[4]
So, while we might expect a certain reactionary response to the party thrown for Archbishop Bober, there is in fact a long tradition into which we can place the Košice rave. Whether Pope Leo is running the risk of diminishing the stature of his office or leaning into his public persona as a friendly “Midwestern uncle,” is bound to be a personal question. While it will not be to everyone’s taste, as a missional move to connect with young people, it is undeniably interesting, as evidenced by the viral response to videos of the event.
Pirouetting into Protest
But might there be something more at play here than a one-off creative act of outreach? In one the early academic treatments of rave culture, Graham St. John noted examples where large dance events served as platforms for activist movements or sites of resistance. While we do not want to ruin a good party by making it have to have a purpose beyond being fun, St. John identified raves as, potentially, ‘cultural realms occasioning a “politics of the moment” or fields of “playful vitality”.’ There is a sense in which they can become events which ‘dramatize ultimate concerns around which reveller-participants rally: freedom, self-growth, intercultural reconciliation, the environment, world peace.’[5] The rave will always be more than a political gesture, but they can certainly be that as well.
The American theologian, Jennifer Baldwin, develops this thread in her proposal that political protests have a liturgical dimension. Just as liturgy is performed, the protest is performed. Just as the liturgy has rules and roles, gestures and responses that structure it as familiar but with flexibility for adaptation, the protest has the same. The protest is ‘is a kind of en masse ritual dance that is scripted, structured, and purposeful movement of bodies—individual and the body politic.’[6] Dance functions as the lens through which she suggests we interrogate the meaning of the protest because such public displays of resistance stand as ‘embodied, communal movement practices’ which ‘provide a sense of grounded identity and being’ in the face of whatever force is being opposed.[7]
This is not an argument that might function as an abstract proposition on the page, but has no referent in the real world. We can think of Māori hakas performed in solidarity with Palestine, or Kurdish folk dancers protesting Turkish State oppression of culture,[8] or acts of “disco-bedience” on the streets of Madrid to agitate for faster climate action.[9] As I write, one of the most striking of the many protests to the actions of “ICE” anti-immigrant actions in American cities is the phenomenon of “frog dances.”
Conclusion: Waiting for the Spirit Drop
We can consider protest as a kind of liturgical performative action and, as Johnson and Craigo-Snell remind us, it is always possible to read Christian liturgy as performance art.[10] Introducing dance as a common element allows us to see how worship bumps up against protest, and protest can be joyous as opposed to simply combative.
On one level, what happened in St. Elisabeth’s square was just an unusual party. But there remains something fundamentally political about all public acts of joy. The embodied reality of communal dance is always in some way a protest, if only against the regimes of efficiency that shape our days and form our imaginations.
By sampling the words of Pope Leo XIV over an electronic beat, Padre Guilherme did more than present important ideas in a new genre. The openness to such an event subverts the assumptions about how the church can or should be in public. Displaying such a “playful vitality” acknowledges the human body as a site of grace, demonstrates that the act of communal gathering is powerful, and reminds us that it is joyous to dance.
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[1] Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (Fortress Press, 1993), 128.
[2] Kathleen S. Turner, And We Shall Learn Through the Dance: Liturgical Dance as Religious Education (Pickwick, 2021), 122.
[3] John Waller, A Time to Dance; A Time to Die (Icon Books, 2009), 101.
[4] Laura Hellsten, Through the Bone and Marrow: Re-Examining Theological Encounters with Dance in Medieval Europe, Studia Traditionis Theologiae (Brepols Publishers, 2021), 45:44.
[5] Graham St. John, ‘The Difference Engine: Liberation and the Rave Imaginary’, in Rave Culture and Religion, Routledge Advances in Sociology (Taylor and Francis, 2003), 32.
[6] Jennifer Baldwin, ‘Protest and Resistance as the Liturgy of the People’, in Taking It to the Streets – Public Theologies of Activism and Resistance, ed. Jennifer Baldwin (Lexington Books, 2019), 68.
[7] Baldwin, ‘Protest and Resistance as the Liturgy of the People’, 70.
[8] Rachael Gunn et al., Dance and Protest Special Issue Editorial, 2023, 2.
[9] ‘“Civil Discobedience”: Dancing in Protest as UN Climate Summit Proceeds’, The Irish Times, 7 December 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/civil-discobedience-dancing-in-protest-as-un-climate-summit-proceeds-1.4108458.
[10] Todd E. Johnson and Shannon Craigo-Snell, ‘Performing Arts and Embodiment in Christian Theology’, in St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, ed. Brendan N. Wolfe (St Andrew’s University, 30 August 2024), https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/PerformingArtsandEmbodiment.