Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo at the Vatican, in an Exchange of a Rosary and an Autobiography

The American singer-songwriter and poet Bob Dylan met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday, November 4. Dylan visited the American pope during a break between concert dates 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'.

Leo had quoted from an unpublished protest song Dylan penned in 1963, 'Go Away You Bomb', in his 2026 book 'Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift'.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, in which the bomb is hated because it is man-made, man-owned and man-handled.

Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan. One was the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official who also accompanied Patti Smith to a July audience with Leo. The other was Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

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 was born in Chicago in 1955 and grew up familiar with Dylan's music.

Spadaro also noted that Dylan was very familiar with St. Augustine of Hippo, the inspiration of Leo's spirituality and his Augustinian religious order. Dylan penned 'I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine' for the 1967 album John Wesley Harding.

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.

It was not Dylan's first papal encounter. In 1997 he played for Pope John Paul II, and thousands of other people, during a concert capping a religious congress in Bologna, Italy.

Dylan changed his name from Robert Zimmerman. He was born to a Jewish family in Minnesota, and famously became a born-again Christian in 1979.