Bob Dylan meets Pope Leo at the Vatican during Italian concert run
Seven Lights
Pope Leo received Bob Dylan at the Vatican on Wednesday for a private audience arranged during the singer’s run of concerts in Italy. The Vatican said the encounter was brief. Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan presented the pope with a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One”.
The meeting was organised by the Jesuit intellectual Antonio Spadaro, who had secured a July audience with Leo, and by Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Spadaro said Dylan had wanted to speak with the pope and that the two met alone for a few minutes.
In an essay in L’Osservatore Romano, Spadaro recalled that the former Robert Prevost, born in Chicago in 1955, grew up familiar with Dylan’s music. He also noted Dylan’s acquaintance with St Augustine of Hippo, the inspiration for Leo’s spirituality and his Augustinian religious order: Dylan recorded “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for the 1967 album “John Wesley Harding”.
Leo has drawn on the singer’s work himself. In his 2026 book “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift”, the pope quoted from “Go Away You Bomb”, an unpublished protest song Dylan wrote in 1963, in a passage warning against a race to rearm.
Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, wore a black hoodie and a loose tie, his hood raised in the Vatican’s photographs of the encounter. It was not Dylan’s first encounter with a pope: he played for Pope John Paul II and thousands of others at a 1997 concert in Bologna capping a religious congress.
Born Robert Zimmerman to a Jewish family in Minnesota, Dylan became a born-again Christian in 1979 and recorded songs such as “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved”, which alienated some long-time fans. In recent years he has been more circumspect about belief, describing himself in a 2022 interview as a religious person.
The audience fell between Italian concert dates on this leg of Dylan’s touring schedule. The Vatican released photographs of the meeting and confirmed the exchange of gifts, and gave no further detail of what the two discussed.