On the pleasant afternoon of May 30, locals in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn heard a new kind of music filling the streets—soulful R&B songs, Brazilian samba lyrics comparing God to a soccer game, and an electric guitar riffing to shouts of “Praise the Lord!”
The public square next to San Damiano Church, which normally hosted pigeons, instead hosted about four hundred young people who came to hear the music for free. Shalom missionaries from countries like Brazil, Italy, and Colombia set up a stage, sound system, and LED screen to create a bite-size Christian Coachella in the heart of Brooklyn. They called it Halleluya.
This area of Brooklyn is not known for religious zeal; in fact, a 2016 New York Times article called it a religious “dead zone.” As the older generation of Eastern European immigrants gave way to wealthy young professionals, the 2010s saw two local churches close down while a handful of other shrinking parishes merged and consolidated.
To renew the shuttered church of San Damiano, the Diocese of Brooklyn brought in missionaries from Shalom Catholic Community, who made the Halleluya music festival a key pillar of their evangelizing efforts.
The original Halleluya music festival took place in 1997 in Fortaleza, Brazil, featuring high-energy Christian music that appealed to young audiences. It has expanded to a five-day festival that now draws in 1.2 million attendees annually, and has since spread from Brazil to Argentina, Poland, Panama—and now Brooklyn.
Missionary Barbara Freitas explains, “The theme of the event was ‘Hope Never Sleeps,’ and we hope that Halleluya brought hope to people’s life. Every new encounter we have with people is an opportunity for God himself to encounter the people, [by] seeing God in them and allowing them to see God in us.”
Freitas estimates around 100 local volunteers helped run the festival. The night before, volunteers set up the stage and kept a protective watch over the equipment all night. After a morning Mass, the Canadian missionary Mylene Otou kicked off the festival with her unique style of gospel music. Mike Delouis, a friend of Shalom and an R&B singer, took to the stage in the afternoon to sing his original music, followed by the Scally Brothers, a contemporary Christian worship duo from Toledo, Ohio. They played original songs including “Defined By You.” In the afternoon, the Brazilian band Morelzhino performed samba music set to Portuguese lyrics. Lead singer Rafael Morel played their newly released song, “A Melhor Jogada,” that uses the metaphor of a soccer game to talk about faith. The festival closed with Damascus Worship and Misionario Shalom.
All day, attendees could visit adoration in the church with the Bishop of Brooklyn. Also featured at the festival: a live-painting from the artist Brendan McNally, a blood drive signup that saved 93 lives, and an outreach that brought food to around 50 people in shelters.
The festival attracted hundreds of local young people who had never participated in Shalom before. One such person, a young man named Eryk, heard about the festival on Instagram. “When I got there everyone was warm and inviting all the way to Father Cristiano who took the time out to shake my hand and talk to me. Everything from the food to the music had a feeling of community…Many groups and organizations in my life have tried to give off that feeling while Shalom and the Halleluya festival simply had it.” After his positive experience at Halleluya, Eryk decided to volunteer with the missionaries the following week to bring food to homeless shelters.
Missionary Barbara Freitas estimates the festival drew about 1,000 attendees over the course of the day. The crowd size fluctuated, with about 100 in the morning and about 400 by the evening. Freitas describes meeting people from many countries and religions, including many non-Christians who walked in from the street. She compares it to Pentecost because of “the diversity of the people who come from different places, gathering in one place and receiving an outstanding joy, a burst of joy of the presence of God. Many of these people stayed for adoration, stayed for prayer, or prayed in the church.” After the festival about 30 new people signed up for their Life in the Spirit Seminar, and Freitas believes half came from the festival.
Freitas credits the Catholic Foundation of Brooklyn and Queens for helping fund the event as well as the many volunteers. She is grateful for “being able to proclaim the love of God, the joy of Christ on the streets, to be Catholic on the streets, and live a relationship with God on the street.”
Ryan Byrnes
