You’ve all seen the photos by now. But now we know a little more about this week’s meeting between Bob Dylan and Pope Leo XIV, thanks to an email interview in Report double Ethe in-depth Bob Dylan substack led by Dylan expert Ray Padgett.
Padgett interviewed Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest serving as undersecretary for culture and education at the Holy See, who previously brokered a meeting between the pope and Patti Smith. And although Spadaro respected the intimacy of the one-on-one meeting between the two Midwesterners – Dylan is from Hibbing, Minnesota, eight hours north of the pope’s hometown of Chicago – he gave insight into their relationship and their meeting at the Vatican. “The way they looked at each other was beautiful and intense,” Spadaro told Padgett.
According to Spadaro, it became clear that Dylan wanted to meet the pope, and vice versa. “Leo was completely open to it,” Spadaro said.
The pope is, among other things, an American baby boomer who earlier this summer referenced in a footnote of a peace treatise Dylan lyrics so obscure that even Padgett had never heard of them.
This isn’t the first time Dylan fans have learned new information about the Padgett singer-songwriter, a self-proclaimed fan who rolling stone spoke last year about his endless Dylan scoops.
In his exchange with Padgett, the priest also cleared up some confusion about why everyone was talking about a certain Dylan song — 1967’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” — when discussing their meeting. (Pope Leo has been called “the first Augustinian pope.”)
The connection came, originally, from Spadaro himself. “I couldn’t help thinking that Dylan had once dreamed of the saint of whom this pope declared himself a son from the loggia of St. Peter’s,” Spadaro wrote to Padgett. “It’s a beautiful and harsh song: the dreamer wakes up and discovers that he was part of the crowd that put Augustine to death.”
Did Dylan and the Pope talk about this connection?
“As for anything that is said at this table,” Spadaro said, “that stays between the two of them.”
Gn entert
