Pope Leo XIV received singer-songwriter and Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan, 85, in a private audience on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 4, at the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. According to Vatican News, it was a brief meeting consisting of greetings and a relaxed conversation around a table, which the artist attended wearing a black hooded sweatshirt. The Pope gave him a rosary, and Dylan reciprocated with a copy of his autobiography, Chronicles, Volume 1. The appointment did not appear on the Pontiff’s official schedule.
Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro and Andrea Monda, director of L’Osservatore Romano, accompanied the musician on his tour of the Apostolic Palace. Spadaro explained on his X account that it was difficult not to feel the emotion of a meeting “with a taste of history” and that, at every step, it seemed that “absolutely anything” could happen. He added that Carlo Feltrinelli and Susan Pullman were also with them, and that he would write about the audience in the Holy See’s newspaper.
Dylan’s verses in the prologue of a book on disarmament
The underlying reason is that Pope Leo XIV had quoted Dylan’s verses in the prologue of Disarmed and Disarming: Peace Is a Gift, the book published by the Vatican Publishing House that collects his interventions on peace. In that text, the Pope used the song Go Away You Bomb to warn against global rearmament and the nuclear threat. It is a protest song written in 1963, during the Cold War, that was never officially recorded or published, and whose manuscript remained unpublished until it was rediscovered in 2013. InfoVaticana reported on that publication in With Bob Dylan as inspiration, Pope Leo XIV publishes his first anthology on peace.
Dylan is currently on tour in Italy with his Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, and was scheduled to perform on Thursday, November 5, at the Palazzo dello Sport in Rome. This is not his first contact with a Pope: in 1997 he sang before John Paul II and some 300,000 young people at the National Eucharistic Congress in Bologna, where he performed three of his classics, including Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.
Another audience with a contemporary artist
The visit adds to the one Pope Leo XIV granted on July 31 to Patti Smith, which Spadaro recalled in his message and about which InfoVaticana published Pope Leo XIV receives Patti Smith. This type of audience with figures from popular culture has fueled debate about the media exposure of the papacy, which the auxiliary bishop emeritus of Chur, Marian Eleganti, questioned in his reflection on the media drift of the papacy, warning that personality, rather than the office, tends to take center stage.