Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican Between Italian Dates

Bob Dylan met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday, in a brief private audience squeezed between the singer's concert dates in Milan on Monday and Rome on Thursday.

The Vatican said the encounter was short. Leo gave Dylan a rosary. Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.

The meeting had a literary prehistory. Leo quoted an unpublished 1963 Dylan protest song, "Go Away You Bomb," in his 2026 book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. The pope cited the lyric — addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb — while warning against the race to rearm and recourse to nuclear weapons: "I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an' man-handled."

Who arranged the meeting?

Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan: the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied Patti Smith to a July audience with Leo, and Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

Spadaro said Dylan had wanted to speak with Leo, and the two met privately for a few minutes. In an essay in L'Osservatore Romano, Spadaro recalled that the former Robert Prevost — born in Chicago in 1955 — grew up familiar with Dylan's music.

Spadaro also noted a deeper consonance. Dylan knows St. Augustine of Hippo well, the inspiration for Leo's spirituality and Augustinian order, and wrote "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" for his 1967 album John Wesley Harding.

What does this change for Dylan's standing?

Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, wore a black hoodie with a loose tie, the hood over his head in Vatican photos of the encounter. The image did the interpretive work the Vatican's terse statement declined to do. No details of the private conversation were released.

It was not Dylan's first papal encounter. He played for Pope John Paul II — and thousands of others — in 1997 at a concert capping a religious congress in Bologna, Italy.

The singer's relationship with organized religion has a long public arc. Born Robert Zimmerman to a Jewish family in Minnesota, he became a born-again Christian in 1979 and alienated some longtime fans with songs like "Gotta Serve Somebody" and "Saved."

In recent years Dylan has grown more circumspect about his beliefs. In a 2022 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he described himself as a "religious person" who reads the scriptures, meditates and prays.

A lyric that now reads as prophecy

Dylan met Leo between Italian tour stops: Milan on Monday, Rome on Thursday. At his most recent concert before the Vatican visit, he sang his 1997 song "Tryin' to Get to Heaven," with the lyric: "I've been all around the world, boys/Now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door."

The Vatican released photographs but no transcript; what the two men said to each other remains, for now, theirs alone. Given Leo's continued warnings on rearmament, the 1963 anti-bomb lyric he chose to publish is likely to surface again.