Bob Dylan walked into the Apostolic Palace on Wednesday, November 4, and sat down with Pope Leo XIV. Page Six reported the visit fell during a break between concert dates in Italy, where the 85-year-old is touring his Rough and Rowdy Ways show. A few minutes, in private, at the singer’s own request.
Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican
Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official, helped arrange it. According to Page Six, Spadaro said Dylan had wanted to speak with Leo. Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, came along too.
Spadaro sounded starstruck afterward. Writing on social media, as E! Online reported, he described an encounter with “a real sense of history about it.”
Pope Leo had already shown his hand. In July, his book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift quoted Dylan’s 1963 protest song “Go Away You Bomb,” a track that was never officially recorded or released. Leo used a lyric aimed at an imagined atomic bomb, condemning it as made, owned and handled by men, to warn against the race to rearm.
Pope Leo quoted an unreleased Dylan song in his book’s preface. That’s a fan move. Nobody digs that deep into a catalog by accident.
The Pope Gave Dylan a Rosary During Their Meeting
Vatican News described the meeting as brief, with greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges. Leo gave Dylan a rosary. Dylan handed over a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.
Two gifts, and each one says something about the giver. The pope offered an object of prayer. The songwriter offered his own story, in his own words. Neither tried to be the other.
Spadaro also wrote, in an essay for L’Osservatore Romano, that Leo grew up in Chicago familiar with Dylan’s music. He pointed out that Dylan wrote “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for the 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Augustine is the inspiration behind Leo’s own religious order.
Dylan’s Hoodie Contrasted with the Pope’s Cassock
Vatican photos showed Leo, 71, in a classic white cassock. Bob Dylan stood beside him in black, a hoodie and a loose tie, with the hood pulled over his head for the whole meeting.
Dylan showed up dressed almost entirely in black, head to toe. He kept the hood of his jacket up for the meeting. Pope Leo, 71, stood beside him in a classic white cassock, a humorously opposite picture.
Fair enough. Granted a papal audience, Dylan dressed exactly like Dylan.
Dylan’s Faith and the Song the Pope Quoted
Born Robert Zimmerman to a Jewish family in Minnesota, Dylan became a born-again Christian in 1979. Page Six noted that songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved” alienated some longtime fans at the time. He has kept quieter about belief since, though he told the Wall Street Journal in 2022 that he is a “religious person” who reads scripture, meditates and prays.
He has crossed papal paths before. In 1997 he performed for Pope John Paul II at a religious congress in Bologna, where the pope quoted “Blowin’ in the Wind” back to a crowd of 30,000.
Here is the part worth sitting with. Two men from very different worlds, one Jewish-born and famously guarded about faith, one leading the Catholic church, found common ground through a song about a bomb. Real connection between people rarely starts with agreeing on everything. It starts when one person has clearly paid attention to what the other made, and says so. Leo read the deep cuts. Dylan asked for the meeting.
What they actually said in those few minutes stays between them. The Vatican has released greetings, gifts and photos. Bob Dylan met with Pope Leo XIV on Nov. 4 during his Italy tour.
Sources: E! Online, Page Six, The Blast
