Bob Dylan meets with Pope Leo XIV in private Vatican audience
The singer gave the pope a copy of his autobiography and received a rosary during the brief private meeting.
Bob Dylan met privately with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday. The 85-year-old singer-songwriter presented the pope with a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. Leo, 71, gave Dylan a rosary during what the Vatican described as a brief encounter consisting of greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges. The meeting took place in the Apostolic Palace ahead of Dylan's scheduled concert in Rome.
The visit was arranged by Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official, who said Dylan wanted to speak with the pope. Spadaro and Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, accompanied the singer. Spadaro wrote on social media that it was hard not to feel the emotion of being part of an encounter that had a real sense of history about it. He added there was a feeling that, at every step through the Apostolic Palace, absolutely anything could happen.
What did the two men discuss?
No official account of the private conversation was released. The meeting was described as an informal exchange focused on major ethical issues, particularly the rejection of armed conflict and the threat of nuclear weapons. Pope Leo has a known appreciation for Dylan's work, having quoted from an unpublished protest song Dylan penned in 1963, Go Away You Bomb, in his 2026 book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. In that book, the pope warned against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons. He quoted the lyric, addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.” The song was written amid the Cold War but never recorded, and its lyrics were discovered and put up for auction in 2013.
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Has Bob Dylan met a pope before?
This was not Dylan's first encounter with a head of the Catholic Church. In 1997, he performed before Pope John Paul II and about 300,000 young people for the 23rd National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, Italy. During that concert, he played four songs and reportedly climbed onto the stage mid-set to shake hands with the pope and exchange a few words. In his sermon to the crowd, Pope John Paul II quoted from Dylan's classic song Blowin' in the Wind. The then-pope said, “You asked me: how many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? I answer you: one! There is only one road of man and it is Christ, who said: ‘I am the way.’ The answer is blowing in the wind… but there is an evil wind that pushes towards nothingness, and there is the wind of the Holy Spirit that leads to God.”
What are Bob Dylan's religious beliefs?
Bob Dylan, who changed his name from Robert Zimmerman, was born to a Jewish family in Minnesota. He famously became a born-again Christian in 1979. In recent years, he has spoken about his religious beliefs. In a 2022 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dylan said that he was a “religious person.”
“I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it,” Dylan said. Dylan's visit with Pope Leo took place ahead of his scheduled performance at the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome on Wednesday, which is one of the stops on the European leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.
With files from Global News, Q107 Toronto and Castanet