Bob Dylan Meets Pope Leo XIV in Brief Private Audience at the Vatican

Bob Dylan had a brief private audience with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday, an encounter that stood out less as an official meeting than as a symbolic moment between a major American songwriter and a pope who had already publicly invoked Dylan’s work. Vatican News said Leo received Dylan on Nov. 4 at the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City.

“The meeting between Pope Leo and Dylan … was brief, consisting of greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges,” Vatican News reported. The Vatican said the two men also exchanged gifts: Leo gave Dylan a rosary, and Dylan gave the pope a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. No public transcript, joint statement or initiative was announced, and all available reporting described the audience as a short private reception.

The clearest public link between the two predates Wednesday’s visit. In July, Leo — the Chicago-born pontiff elected in May 2025 as the first pope born in North America — quoted Dylan’s 1963 anti-nuclear lyric “Go Away You Bomb” in a preface to the Vatican-published book Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift. The pope cited the line, “I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled,” in a text focused on peace and disarmament, giving the eventual audience an unusual cultural backdrop.

Dylan was in Italy between dates on his “Rough and Rowdy Ways” tour. Reporting said he had played Milan earlier in the week and was scheduled to perform in Rome on Thursday, Nov. 5. According to AP and other wire reports, he was accompanied at the Vatican by Rev. Antonio Spadaro and Andrea Monda, the editor of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

The Vatican identified Dylan by his birth name, Robert Allen Zimmerman, and noted that he is a Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. Dylan, 85, is one of the most decorated and influential songwriters of the past century, and this was not his first documented papal encounter. Vatican reporting noted that he also briefly met Pope John Paul II in 1997 during the National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna.

That history, along with Leo’s earlier citation of Dylan’s anti-nuclear lyrics, made Wednesday’s audience notable as an arts-and-faith meeting with an existing thread of connection. But beyond the Vatican’s short description of greetings, gift exchanges and a few light remarks, no further details were released.