VATICAN CITY — Bob Dylan came knocking on Pope Leo XIV’s door Wednesday, as the American singer-songwriter and poet visited the American pope at the Vatican during a break between concerts in Italy.
The Vatican said the meeting was brief, with Leo giving Dylan a rosary and Dylan presenting the pope with a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.”
Leo had cited an unreleased protest song written by Dylan in 1963, “Go Away You Bomb,” in his 2026 book “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift.”
Leo warned against the race for rearmament and the use of nuclear weapons and quoted the words, addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb: “I hate you because you are made and possessed by man, and manipulated by man. »
Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan: the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied Patti Smith to an audience with Leo in July; 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 published in L’Osservatore Romano, he recalls that the elder Robert Prevost, born in Chicago in 1955, grew up familiar with Dylan’s music.
He also noted that Dylan was very familiar with St. Augustine of Hippo, the inspiration for Leo’s spirituality and the Augustinian religious order, writing “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for the 1967 album “John Wesley Harding.”
Dylan, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, wore a black hoodie and loose tie. Vatican photos of the meeting showed him with the hood over his head.
This wasn’t Dylan’s first papal encounter: He performed for Pope John Paul II and thousands of others in 1997 at a concert closing a religious congress in Bologna, Italy.
Dylan, who changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, was born to a Jewish family in Minnesota. He became a born-again Christian in 1979 and alienated some of his longtime fans with songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved.”
In recent years, Dylan has been more circumspect about his religious beliefs. In a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Dylan said he is a “religious person” who reads scripture, meditates and prays.
Dylan met Leo between concerts in Italy. He played in Milan on Monday and plays in Rome on Thursday. At his last concert before meeting the pope, Dylan sang his 1997 song “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” which features the lyrics “I’ve been around the world, boys/Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door.”
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