Bob Dylan came knockin’ on Pope Leo XIV’s door on Wednesday, as the American singer-songwriter and poet visited with the American Pope at the Vatican during a break between concert dates in Italy. Source: NCR Online.
The Vatican said the encounter was brief, with Pope Leo giving Dylan Rosary beads and Dylan presenting the Pope with a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One.
Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, wore a black hoodie and a loose tie. Vatican photos of the encounter showed him with the hood over his head.
Pope Leo had quoted from an unpublished protest song Dylan penned in 1963, “Go Away You Bomb,” in his 2026 book “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift.
Leo was warning against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons and quoted the lyric, addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.”
Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan: Fr Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied another American singer songwriter, Patti Smith, to a July audience with Leo; and Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
Fr Spadaro said Dylan had wanted to speak with Leo, and the two met in private for a few minutes. In an essay in L’Osservatore Romano, he recalled that the former Robert Prevost, who was 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 of Leo’s spirituality and Augustinian religious order, penning I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine for the 1967 album John Wesley Harding.
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 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 that he was a “religious person” who reads the scriptures, meditates and prays.
FULL STORY
Bob Dylan comes knockin’ on pope’s door as Leo welcomes legend to Vatican (By Nicole Winfield, AP via NCR Online)
