For Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter whose life has moved from a Jewish upbringing through evangelical Christianity, and Pope Leo XIV, head of the Catholic Church, the private Vatican audience brought together a public history of faith and a shared connection to an anti-nuclear song from 1963.
Pope Leo granted Dylan a private audience at the Vatican on 4 November. Vatican News described Wednesday’s encounter as “brief”, with “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges”.
Dylan wore a black hoodie with its hood up, seemingly supported by a black baseball cap. The audience took place at the Vatican, the pope’s official residence in Rome, during a break between Dylan’s Italian concert dates.
Dylan had played Milan on Monday and was scheduled to play Rome on Thursday. Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a Vatican culture ministry official, and Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, accompanied him to the audience.
The pope gave Dylan a rosary, while Dylan handed Leo his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. A photograph published by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication showed Dylan at the meeting, while another seemingly showed him signing a book for His Holiness after removing a single glove.
The connection between the two men’s public work lies in “Go Away You Bomb”, a Dylan lyric Pope Leo used in the preface to his anthology of speeches, Unarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. The pope quoted: “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned an’ man-handled”.
Dylan wrote the song in 1963 for Izzy Young of the Greenwich Village Folklore Center, as part of an unpublished book of anti-nuclear poetry. Young recalled: “I asked everyone I knew to write a song about the nuclear bomb. Bob Dylan came in literally the next day and handed this to me.”
Dylan was raised Jewish and changed his name from Robert Zimmerman. He converted to evangelical Christianity in 1978, released a string of Christian albums and performed Christian songs in live shows before dialling down the religious fervour in later years.
In a 2022 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Dylan said he was a “religious person” who reads the scriptures, meditates and prays. He had previously played at a concert honouring Pope John Paul II in 1997, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, was born in Chicago in 1955. He has also held private audiences with Patti Smith and Bad Bunny in the past year, meeting Bad Bunny in June while both were touring Spain and Smith in August.
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