American singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan visited Pope Leo at the Vatican on Wednesday. The meeting took place during a break between Dylan's concert dates in Italy.
The Vatican stated that the encounter was brief. During the meeting, Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan presented the pope with a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.
Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan: Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, and Reverend Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied Patti Smith to a July audience with Leo. Spadaro said Dylan wanted to speak with Leo, and the two met in private for a few minutes.
In an essay in L’Osservatore Romano, Spadaro recalled that the former Robert Prevost, who was born in Chicago in 1955, grew up familiar with Dylan’s music. Spadaro also noted that Dylan was very familiar with St Augustine of Hippo, the inspiration of Leo’s spirituality and Augustinian religious order, having penned “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for the 1967 album John Wesley Harding.
Leo had previously quoted an unpublished protest song Dylan penned in 1963, “Go Away You Bomb”, in his 2026 book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. In that book, Leo warned against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons, quoting the lyric addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ manhandled.”
Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, wore a black hoodie and a loose tie. Vatican photos of the encounter showed him with the hood over his head.
This was not Dylan's first papal encounter; he played for Pope John Paul II and thousands of other people in 1997 during a concert capping a religious congress in Bologna, Italy.
Dylan, who changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, was born to a Jewish family in Minnesota. He famously became a born-again Christian in 1979 and alienated some of his long-time fans with songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved”. In more recent years, Dylan has been more circumspect about his religious beliefs. In a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Dylan said that he was a “religious person” who reads the scriptures, meditates and prays.
Dylan met with Leo in between concert dates in Italy. He played in Milan on Monday and is playing Rome on Thursday. In his most recent concert before the meeting with the pope, Dylan sang his 1997 song “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” that contains the lyric: “I’ve been all around the world, boys/Now I’m trying to get to Heaven before they close the door.”
