Bob Dylan Asked To Meet The Pope. The Pope Had Already Quoted Him.

Pope Leo XIV received Bob Dylan in a private audience at the Apostolic Palace on Wednesday, the Vatican announced — recording the encounter, in the formal language of the papal diary, as the pope having “received in private audience Mr. Robert Allen Zimmerman.” The meeting was brief, a matter of greetings and light exchanges, the Vatican said: Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan gave Leo a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. Photographs show the pope, 71, in his white cassock, and Dylan, 85, in a black coat, black gloves and a black hoodie with the hood up. No substantive conversation was reported, and the Vatican press office did not comment on what, if anything, was discussed.

The initiative, according to the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, an official of the Vatican’s culture ministry who said he helped arrange it, came from Dylan: he had wanted to speak with Leo. Dylan was in Italy on tour — he played Milan on Monday and Rome’s Palazzo dello Sport on Thursday — and the audience fell between the two dates; he was accompanied by Andrea Monda, the editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. The interest ran both ways, and the pope’s side of it is in print. In his 2026 book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, Leo quoted Dylan’s song “Go Away You Bomb” — an anti-nuclear protest lyric Dylan wrote in 1963 and never released on a record — including the line: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.” That a pope reached, in a book about peace, for an unreleased lyric written by a 22-year-old folksinger in 1963 says something about the reach of Dylan’s catalogue; that the singer then asked to come and talk about it says the reach runs in both directions. Spadaro noted in an Osservatore Romano essay that Leo — born Robert Prevost in Chicago in 1955, the first American pope — grew up familiar with Dylan’s music, and that Dylan knows St. Augustine, the subject of his 1967 song “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

It was not Dylan’s first papal encounter, and the first one could hardly have been more different in scale. On September 27, 1997, he headlined the concert closing the 23rd Italian National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, playing for Pope John Paul II before a crowd reported at roughly 300,000 to 350,000 young people. He performed “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” then took off his cowboy hat, climbed the steps and shook the pope’s hand, returning to encore with “Forever Young.” John Paul II then addressed the young crowd with a short speech built on Dylan’s own “Blowin’ in the Wind,” telling them, in part, that the answer is not the wind that blows things away but the breath of the Spirit — a pope preaching a sermon on a Dylan lyric to a stadium of teenagers, three decades before another pope put a different Dylan lyric in a book. Twenty-nine years later the sequel was a few quiet minutes in an office, a singer in a hoodie and a pope who had already put the singer’s words in his book.

Sources: Associated Press and Reuters reporting from the Vatican, November 4-5, 2026; People magazine; contemporary accounts of the 1997 Bologna concert.