Bob Dylan met Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Wednesday during a break in his Italian concert tour.
The encounter between Dylan, 83, and the American-born pontiff lasted only a few minutes, according to Vatican officials. The Vatican said Leo gave the rock legend a rosary, and Dylan presented the pope with a copy of his autobiography, “Chronicles: Volume One.”
Two Vatican officials accompanied Dylan to the meeting: the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a culture ministry official who had previously escorted Patti Smith to a July audience with Leo, and Andrea Monda, editor of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano. Spadaro said in an essay for L’Osservatore Romano that Dylan himself had wanted to speak with the pope, and the two met in private.
Spadaro noted that the former Robert Prevost, born in Chicago in 1955, grew up familiar with Dylan’s music. He also pointed out Dylan’s own familiarity with St. Augustine of Hippo, the inspiration of Leo’s spirituality and Augustinian religious order. Dylan had penned “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” for his 1967 album “John Wesley Harding.”
Leo had previously quoted from an unpublished Dylan protest song in his 2026 book “Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift.” The pope was warning against the race to rearm and the recourse to nuclear weapons when he cited the lyric from “Go Away You Bomb,” which Dylan wrote in 1963. The line, addressed to a hypothetical atomic bomb, reads:
“I hate you cause yer man-made and man-owned, an’ man-handled.”
Dylan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, wore a black hoodie and a loose tie to the Vatican meeting. Vatican photos showed him with the hood over his head.
The meeting came between concert dates in Italy for Dylan, who played Milan on Monday and was scheduled to perform in Rome on Thursday. At his most recent concert before the papal visit, he sang his 1997 song “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” which contains the lyric, “I’ve been all around the world, boys/Now I’m trying to get to heaven before they close the door.”
This was not Dylan’s first papal encounter. He played for Pope John Paul II and thousands of others in 1997 during a concert capping a religious congress in Bologna, Italy.
Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman to a Jewish family in Minnesota, famously became a born-again Christian in 1979. That conversion alienated some longtime fans with songs like “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “Saved.” In more recent years, he has been more circumspect about his religious beliefs. In a 2022 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dylan said that he was a “religious person” who reads the scriptures, meditates and prays.
Dylan performs next in Rome on Thursday.