The Handshake Behind the Hood: How Bob Dylan Met Pope Leo XIV

By Elena Vasquez

Bob Dylan met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Nov. 4, and the internet talked mostly about his hood. Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit priest who brokered the meeting, says everyone missed the point.

"People talked a lot about what Dylan was wearing that afternoon and very little about what the pope had written," Spadaro said. The pope had quoted "Go Away You Bomb" — an unpublished 1963 Dylan work — in the preface of his 2026 book, Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. In the piece, Dylan addressed the bomb directly: "I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an' man-handled."

Spadaro, 60, serves as undersecretary for culture and education at the Holy See. A native of Messina and former editor-in-chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, he framed the encounter in historical terms.

"In 1963, a young man just past 20, in New York, told a bomb to its face that it was the work of human hands," Spadaro said. Sixty-three years later, "the author of that sheet of paper — which no one had wanted to buy at auction — shook hands with his most authoritative reader. For anyone who believes in the weight of words, it is a small parable. The hood, by comparison, is a side note."

What did the close-up photo reveal?

Spadaro posted a zoomed photograph on Instagram — twice — of Dylan's hand clasping the pope's. Dylan's skin showed blue veins and a dry, powdery texture; the hand looked all of his 85 years.

"The hands said what the hood kept hidden," Spadaro said. "Bob's face was in shadow; his hands, though, were bare, and he had bared them himself, taking off his gloves to greet the pope."

The priest drew on art history to explain the framing. "I thought of Dürer's 'Praying Hands,' the 1508 study in which the veins and the worn skin tell an entire life."

By tightening the frame, Spadaro said, "I took away the fame and the colors of their clothes. What remained were two men well along in years, clasping hands, and it seemed to me the truest photograph of that afternoon."

The gesture echoed 1997, when Dylan removed his cowboy hat before meeting Pope John Paul II in Bologna. "In 1997 he bared his head; in 2026, his hands," Spadaro said.

At St. Anne's Gate, Spadaro admits he was the only one who hesitated about the hood. Dylan's team explained that the hood "is part of how Bob moves through the world, onstage and off." Leo, he said, "looked the man in the eye, and the hood receded into the background."

How did the meeting come together?

The wish existed on both sides. "Bob wanted to meet the first American pope, and the pope needed no convincing," Spadaro said. "A man who has already quoted you in a footnote is ready to receive you."

Scheduling was the real work. Dylan played Milan on Monday and was due in Rome on Thursday. The pope left for Latin America on Friday. Wednesday was the only opening — and it sufficed.

Is the pope a Dylanologist?

"Go Away You Bomb" appears on no record. Dylan wrote it in 1963 for an anti-atomic-bomb songbook that Izzy Young of the Folklore Center never published. The sheet stayed among Young's papers for half a century, then surfaced at Christie's in 2013 — where it never sold.

"I don't see a Dylanologist so much as a reader who knows where to look," Spadaro said. In his footnote, Leo calls the text a "poetic composition" and places it next to Augustine and Paul VI.

The pope's Dylan connection runs deeper. His Villanova classmate Jim Musselman — who founded the folk label Appleseed Recordings and released records by Pete Seeger — gave the future pope an essay arguing Dylan was the great poetic talent of their generation.

What happened behind closed doors?

Spadaro was not present for the private talk, and believes that was right. He saw the before: two men at a table in the library, light banter, gifts exchanged — a rosary on one side, a signed copy of Chronicles on the other. He saw the after: "Bob walking out in silence, deeply absorbed, with the look of a man who is happy and has no intention of explaining why."

Dylan also signed Spadaro's copy of 64 Lyrics, a bilingual Crocetti anthology edited by Alessandro Carrera and Carlo Feltrinelli, using Spadaro's four-color BIC pen. "Even a Nobel Laureate, when the moment comes, signs with whatever pen is at hand," Spadaro said.

Spadaro also arranged Patti Smith's meeting with Leo in late July. Smith opened with "Hi" — echoing her 1979 song "Wave," which imagines addressing John Paul I. Leo caught the reference immediately. They spoke for about 40 minutes.

The pattern suggests Leo intends to keep receiving artists. As Spadaro noted of a comedians' meeting he attended with Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg, Conan O'Brien and Julia Louis-Dreyfus: "the humorist left the Vatican in search of a cassock, and the singer-songwriter came in wearing a hood."