Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican
The 85-year-old singer met the American pope in a private audience on Wednesday. They traded gifts: a rosary for Dylan, a copy of his autobiography for the pope.
Bob Dylan met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday. The two men spoke in private for a few minutes at the Apostolic Palace, the Vatican said.
Leo gave Dylan a rosary. Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One,” published in 2004.
The meeting was arranged with help from the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official. Spadaro said Dylan had wanted to speak with Leo. Spadaro and Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, accompanied Dylan to the palace. Vatican News described the meeting as brief, “consisting of greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
A pope who quotes Dylan
Leo has quoted Dylan before. In the preface to his 2026 book, “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift,” he quoted Dylan’s unpublished 1963 protest song “Go Away You Bomb.” The song is addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb. Leo quoted the line: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.” He was writing against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons.
The two men share more than a home region. Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota. Leo was born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago in 1955. The Vatican newspaper, announcing the meeting, used Dylan’s birth name: “Mr. Robert Allen Zimmerman.”
Spadaro wrote in L’Osservatore Romano that Dylan knows St. Augustine of Hippo well. Augustine is the inspiration for Leo’s Augustinian order. Dylan wrote “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for his 1967 album John Wesley Harding.
Not his first time with a pope
Dylan has met a pope before. In 1997 he performed for Pope John Paul II in Bologna, at a concert closing a religious congress. About 300,000 young people attended.
Dylan, 85, was born to a Jewish family in Minnesota. He became a born-again Christian in 1979. In a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he called himself a “religious person” who reads the scriptures, meditates and prays.
Dylan is in Italy on his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour. He played Milan on Monday and plays Rome on Thursday. In his last show before the meeting, he sang his 1997 song “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven.”
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
.jpg?width=1200)