Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo XIV in Private Audience at the Vatican

Pope Leo XIV received Bob Dylan in a private audience on Wednesday, the latest in a string of sit-downs the pontiff has held with revered musicians over the past year.

According to Vatican News, the meeting was "brief" and consisted of "greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges." The two men also swapped gifts. The pope gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan handed over a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.

The encounter didn't come out of nowhere. Leo has quoted Dylan in print — specifically, in his book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, where he cited the songwriter's unpublished 1963 protest song "Go Away You Bomb."

What's the song, and why does it matter?

Dylan wrote "Go Away You Bomb" in 1963 for Izzy Young, who ran the Greenwich Village Folklore Center. Young later explained the origin in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone: "I asked everyone I knew to write a song about the nuclear bomb. Bob Dylan came in literally the next day and handed this to me."

The song has never been released. Its lyrics, typewritten and then corrected by hand, went up for auction at Christie's in the summer of 2013.

The pope quoted a striking line from it in his book: "'I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an' man-handled.'" In the same volume, Leo commended the pacifist Dorothy Day for her work for peace.

A pattern of papal pop-culture engagement

Dylan joins a short list of musicians granted time with this pope. In June, Pope Leo met Bad Bunny while both were traveling in Spain. Leo was candid about the popularity gap between them.

"If they are confronted with the question do they want to see Bad Bunny or do they want to see the pope, I think many will see Bad Bunny," Leo acknowledged. "But I think there will also be a few here to see the pope. And that says something."

Patti Smith, a fellow Chicagoan like the pope, met Leo in August. "This is a moment that shall forever produce a smile," Smith wrote on Instagram at the time.

The book isn't the only place where the pope's cultural range shows. His first encyclical, Magnifca Humanitas, addressed human dignity in an era of troubling artificial intelligence, with references spanning Picasso, Tolkien's Gandalf, and Schindler's List.

What does this change for the artist?

For Dylan, the audience adds a papal chapter to a late-career arc already heavy with institutional recognition — and it confirms that the Vatican's current occupant tracks his catalogue closely, even its unreleased corners. Wednesday's meeting follows another precedent-setting moment last month, when Leo submitted his mail-in ballot in Chicago ahead of the midterm elections, becoming the first pope to vote in a U.S. general election.

Whether "Go Away You Bomb" stays unpublished is another matter. A pope's imprimatur has revived interest in lesser-known works before, and the 1963 manuscript now carries a citation no Christie's auctioneer could have predicted.