Bob Dylan meets Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican
The musician presented the pontiff with his autobiography after a brief private audience during an Italian concert tour.
By Bianca Herrera ·
Bob Dylan visited Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday, a meeting that occurred during a break in the musician's concert schedule in Italy. The two men spent a few minutes in private conversation before Dylan departed to continue his tour.
According to Vatican officials, the exchange involved the exchange of two specific items. Leo presented Dylan with a rosary, while Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. The Vatican described the encounter as brief.
The musical connection between the two men extends beyond this recent meeting. Leo, born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955, included a lyric from an unpublished 1963 Dylan song in his 2026 book, Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. The lyric, from a track titled Go Away You Bomb, reads: I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an' man-handled. Leo used the quote to discuss the global race to rearm and the use of nuclear weapons.
Two Vatican staff members accompanied Dylan to the audience. These included the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, an official in the Vatican culture ministry, and Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Spadaro noted that Dylan had expressed a desire to speak with Leo. In an essay for L'Osservatore Romano, Spadaro also pointed out that Dylan wrote the 1967 song I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, referencing a figure central to Leo's spiritual heritage.
Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, arrived wearing a black hoodie and a loose tie. Vatican photographs show him with the hood up during the meeting. This was not his first interaction with a pope. He performed for Pope John Paul II in 1997 during a concert in Bologna, Italy, which concluded a religious congress.
Born Robert Zimmerman to a Jewish family in Minnesota, Dylan converted to Christianity in 1979. He has since adopted a more reserved public stance on his faith. In a 2022 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he described himself as a religious person who reads scriptures, meditates, and prays. He played a concert in Milan on Monday and is scheduled to perform in Rome on Thursday.
Before the meeting with the pope, Dylan performed Tryin' to Get to Heaven at his most recent concert. The 1997 song includes the lines: I've been all around the world, boys / Now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door.
